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Book.—, R/ j_ 

Gopight N°__ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 







BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

DUST AND DESTINY 



The Expected Church 


TWELVE SERMONS 

M^RICE 


Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to 
all the flock over which the Holy Ghost hath 
made you overseers, to feed the church of God, 
which he hath purchased with his own blood. 

—Paul 



THE ABINGDON 

NEW YORK 


PRESS 

CINCINNATI 





SVgoc) 

<Ttvs 


Copyright, 1923, by 
M. S. RICE 


Printed in the United States of America 



To 

THE CONGREGATION 

OF THE 

METROPOLITAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
DETROIT, MICHIGAN 


TO WHOM THESE SERMONS WERE DELIVERED, AND WHOSE 
ENTHUSIASM FOR THE CHURCH HAS BEEN UNFALTERINGLY 
SUPPORTED BY THEIR SACRIFICIAL ESPOUSAL OF THE 
CHURCH'S GREAT TASK, THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED. 


i 



CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Foreword... 9 

I. The Expected Church. 11 

“Sir, we would see Jesus.”— John 12. 21. 

II. The Church of Minimums. 28 

“Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye 
shall receive, that your joy may be full.”— John 16. 24. 

III. The Church’s Unity. 47 

“Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also 
I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall 
be one fold, and one shepherd.”— John 10. 16. 

IV. The Twofold Church. 67 

“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he 
that ccmeth after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am 
not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy 
Ghost, and with fire.” —Matthew 3. 11. 

V. The Church’s Message. 86 

“As much as in me is. I am ready to preach the gospel.”— 
Romans 1.16. 

VI. The Church’s Program. 105 

“Thy kingdom come.”— Matthew 6. 10. 

VII. The Church’s Attraction. 120 

“Thus saith the Lord of hosts; In those days it shall come 
to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all languages of 
the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a 
Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that 
God is with you.”— Zechariah 8. 23. 

VIII. The Church an Opportunity. 136 

“Feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his 
own blood.”— Acts 20. 28. 

IX. The Church for To-day. 150 

“No man putteth a piece of new garment upon an old; if 
otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece 
that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old.”— 

Luke 6. 36. 












8 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


X. The Church for the City. 164 

“Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what 
thou must do .”—Acts 9. 6. 

XI. The Church and Childhood. 180 


“And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the 
midst of them .”—Matthew 18. 2. 

XII. Can the Church Save the World?_ 201 

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 
teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have com¬ 
manded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the 
end of the world .”—Matthew 28. 19, 20. 




FOREWORD 


There is so much in a sermon that is not said, 
and hence which cannot accompany the printed 
page that essays to bear a sermon away from 
the platform of its actual delivery, to the eyes 
of readers who must read only the words that 
are printed, that the preacher cannot but feel 
great concern whenever he dares risk his ser¬ 
mon to the rigid judgment of cold type. 

These twelve sermons were delivered, not in a 
series, but in the ordinary course of the preach¬ 
er’s pulpit efforts. They were designed to pre¬ 
sent the ever-changing appeal of the church that 
we love to those who love it, in order that its 
call might not only be heard, but heeded in the 
passion for its great work. Such consecration 
can only justify itself in the conduct, in these 
commanding days, of those who have espoused 
the cause of Him whose we are and whom we 
serve. 


Metropolitan Church, 
Detroit, 1922. 


M. S. R. 



I 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 

“Sir, we would see Jesus.”—John 12. 21. 

The phrase “The Expected Church,” which I 
use to title this sermon, was the caption of an 
unusually interesting and thought-creating edi¬ 
torial in one of the religious journals of our 
country some time since. It was based upon, 
and doubtless prompted by, a remark the editor 
heard from the lips of a prominent attorney in 
one of our larger cities. Some men seated at a 
club were engaged in discussion of the common 
matters of interest in the day’s thought and 
business, and of course, brought themselves 
square up to the problem of what could be done 
to change things that were into things that 
should be. The lawyer finally declared, as the 
discussion of that particular day was breaking 
up, that there was profound significance in the 
fact that before every problematic situation that 
arises to-day there seems to be a general convic¬ 
tion that the church should do something about 
it. He said, “Gentlemen, we seem to close every 
discussion we have, upon whatsoever problem 
we consider, with the same question, ‘What is 
11 


12 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


the church going to do about it?* ” That was 
the remark that caught the editor’s attention, 
and he went away profoundly impressed with 
the great meaning of such a fact and the sure 
judgment such a fact presents before the church 
to-day. The world has come to expect from the 
church a sure leadership in every great move¬ 
ment among men that makes for progress in 
everything of righteousness. The gist of the 
editorial was something like this: “It is a ter¬ 
rific thing for the church to be expected. Its 
duty is serious enough when it is thrusting itself 
upon a world that does not want it. But when 
the world is wanting it, and waiting for it, and 
actually expecting it, then the responsibility 
should make the church quake. If it fails then, 
it squanders opportunity, and trades an offered 
respect for an earned contempt. It not only dis¬ 
appoints God but it likewise betrays humanity. 
The reward for what the church already has 
done is this: it is expected to do more.” All that 
may not be just the way the editorial was 
phrased, but the argument is there, and to my 
mind it has proven one of the most searching 
ideas to reveal present-day duties, that has 
ever been handed to me; and with it now I pro¬ 
pose a frank discussion of what I am convinced 
is the most complimentary fact that has yet been 
paid to the churches’ position in the world. 

We are now the most expected institution on 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


13 


earth. And these are hard days, brim full of 
call to daring, that runs straight into genuine 
sacrifice on every hand. It may seem trite 
and commonplace now to say there never was a 
day so significant in judgment as this. Every 
generation, I presume, has said it. In a way there 
never has been a more important period in the 
world than the one that is always on hand; for 
if it is not doing things that shake the centuries, 
it is making vital way to the day that will do 
them. But enough has been shaken before us and 
about us all now, to startle even the dullest of 
us to the conviction that we are living in the 
very midst of a whole-world crisis. And in the 
day when falterings of men’s plans and hopes 
have made criticism easy and bitter against every 
institution that has carried any professions of 
help, we have heard often that Christianity has 
failed, and men have imagined they were making 
ready her sepulcher again. But just now, with 
the smoke of conflict lifting a bit from the low 
places of the struggle, and just as the staggering 
world is once more catching step for its com¬ 
pelled journey onward, we are seeing as we 
never have seen it before, and we are hearing as 
we have never heard it before, that the Church 
of Jesus Christ must take measure now before 
expectation. 

In the days when we have had to struggle and 
wait for mere recognition in the world, when 


14 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


we have had to pay the price of genuine heroics 
merely to gain standing-room, there could be but 
small responsibility upon us for the conditions 
amid which we had mere foot-room. The history 
of the church thus far has been largely a fight 
for toleration. We have been fascinated in the 
stories of the martyrs and pioneers and mission¬ 
aries who have pushed out into the very ends of 
the world to pre-empt a place. But an expectant 
world now has become a divine challenge. The 
world is worn out from its long and unsuccessful 
struggle with evil, which very struggle it has 
made because men saw what evil meant in the 
light of the message we preach. It turns now to 
the church and expectantly awaits from it a 
leadership compatible with its claims. I believe 
this is the very greatest compliment that has yet 
been won by Christianity. 

He must indeed be a dull reader of modern 
progress who has followed the history men have 
been making in philanthropy and reforms, in in¬ 
dustrial tendencies, and in political democracy, 
and failed to recognize that easily the chief acces¬ 
sion of moral force which all these movements 
have received has come from the church. Things 
which only a short-gone yesterday were under¬ 
taken only as church philanthropy and benevo¬ 
lence, have now become accepted appeals for 
public taxes, and found place as activities of the 
state. I am sure this is the reason for much of 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


15 


the popular expectation now upon us. The 
church has wholly changed its attitude toward 
the world, or, much better might I say, the world 
has discovered its new rights in the church. It 
is no longer a mere refuge from the world, but 
rather it is a training place for the world. The 
story of real navigation cannot be written 
around the sheltered shores of a harbor of refuge. 
I believe in such a harbor, but I believe likewise 
in the ship that can advance through the storm. 
There is to me something infinitely more inspir¬ 
ing to be told that I can be endowed with a 
strength great enough to meet and fight out a 
storm than to be told where I can go for shelter. I 
believe it is in one of Doctor Peabody’s books that 
I found this sentence, and I have carried it much 
just to refresh my soul to service: “The evidence 
of Christian discipleship is not ecclesiastical nor 
doctrinal. It is ethical, social, political, indus¬ 
trial, human. The Christian religion does not 
occupy a separated, even though it be an elevated 
plateau of life, but it descends like a fertilizing 
stream to the world, needy below.” With that 
must go likewise the full liability it implies. I 
stood once with a company of people through a 
long tragedy which was enacted before our help¬ 
less eyes, and which hurled condemnation upon 
our weak hands for hours and hours. The leap¬ 
ing mad sea was crashing ships on many shores. 
Several we had seen come limping into harbor, 


16 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


and reports were coming fast of many that were 
lost, as the storm increased and raged for three 
days and nights. We saw the Mataafa trying 
for harbor, and unable to make it. She was 
crashed against the rocks and broken to pieces 
before pur helplessness. The waves were run¬ 
ning higher than the ship’s masts, and were 
lashed to terror by the sweeping blizzard. We 
walked the shore and condemned our weakness. 
We built fires when darkness fell, and carried 
fuel the whole night long that we might let the 
men know, if any be alive on that hard battered 
hull, that we were at least there. The men of the 
life crew were mercilessly criticized. The fury 
of the storm was no excuse. Their boat was 
hurled back at them when they sought to launch 
it, as though the sea did not mean to tolerate any 
meddling with its feast of fury. The life-line 
fell helpless in the waves, and was broken by the 
ice. But men would not accept all this as an 
excuse for the life crew. “What are life savers 
for,” they insisted, “if not for times when 
storms rage? We didn’t equip them for a calm! 
We rigged their station for storm. Anybody 
can take an old skiff and save men in a calm.” 
Thus talked the men who, furious at their own 
impotency because they knew their fellow men 
were dying right before them, would not brook 
excuse from those whose business it was to save. 
They even said the crew should have sacrificed 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


17 


themselves in the determined endeavor to do 
what they were called to do. I tried to defend 
them with the idea that it was certain death for 
the whole crew if they launched out there, and 
men answered me quickly, with these words, 
“How far short of death are life-savers supposed 
to stop?” That is exactly the spirit which flies 
to quick words about the church to-day. We 
are an expected church. It is the price we must 
pay for the high profession of divine relationship 
we have made. The Bible is written full of 
heroic phrases which cluster around the daring 
life necessary to be lived by those who take up 
the task of our religion. The calls sound like 
blasts of trumpets for battle. We who stand 
committed to the program of Christianity in this 
world must recognize that every element of the 
quietist has been driven from our conduct. The 
kingdom of heaven is for the strong hands that 
can take it. To him, and to him only, that over- 
cometh and endureth to the end are promises 
made. The world is thoroughly justified in 
drawing all this squarely across us in judgment. 
Our Bible has in fact offered them the judgment 
already. The plan of our great conflict has been 
sternly written in virile phrases here. “Fight 
the fight”; “Run the straight race”; “Make 
straight His paths”; “Lay down your lives.” We 
are an expected people. Ours is an expected 
church. 


18 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


The church can point to no greater compli¬ 
ment that it has won from the world in all its 
history than this. Hard though it be for us to 
fully meet it, we are nevertheless duty bound as 
Christians to throw ourselves into the task be¬ 
fore us, and, if need be, sacrifice to the extreme. 
In fact, the path leading to sacrifice is much 
more clearly defined than that leading to ease. 
We must be unfalteringly ready to stake our 
lives in loyalty. Our judgment is of life. Our 
mere age in the world is no basis for boasting. 
Because the church is old is no sure argument 
of its security. There are old falsehoods in the 
world. Age is no basis for pride for those who 
have hard work to do. There must be other con¬ 
fidence. Rauschenbusch has no keener word any¬ 
where in all his many keen observations about 
religion than this: “No religion gains by the 
lapse of time; it only loses. Unless new storms 
pass over it and cleanse it, it will be stifled in its 
own dry foliage. Men seem so afraid of religious 
vagaries, and so little afraid of religious stagna¬ 
tion. Yet the religion of Jesus has much less to 
fear from sitting down to meat with publicans 
and sinners than from that graver danger shown 
and so often condemned by Jesus—the immacu¬ 
late isolation of the Pharisees. The Church of 
Jesus Christ will take care of itself if mixed 
into the three measures of meal; but the fate of 
leaven that is kept to itself is to sour hopelessly. 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


19 


If the church confines itself to theology and the 
Bible, and refuses its larger mission to human¬ 
ity, its theology will gradually become mythol¬ 
ogy, and its Bible a closed book.” 

There can be no question in any open mind 
that reads intelligently the news of the world to¬ 
day, and meditates upon its w ars and plans and 
quarrels, that this difficult day of ours is ser¬ 
iously afflicted with principles w hich are antag¬ 
onistic to the fundamental principles of Chris¬ 
tianity. There are many—and I am inclined to 
believe a growing number just now—who, on 
account of the difficulty thus indicated, declare 
it is so hard to lead a really Christian life that 
they w 7 ill not try to do so. The church is bound 
to speak boldly in our day. We have always 
used the term “the world,” meaning society at 
large, as an expression for evil, and have ex¬ 
pressed the hope that some great victorious day 
this evil world will have to give place to the true 
human society in w r hich the spirit of Christ wall 
be supreme. For many foolish centuries those 
who imagined they were to live real holy lives 
knew no possible way to do so but to separate 
themselves from the world, and, hiding in the 
barren loneness of their own isolation, sought 
there to build up w r hat they chose to call holi¬ 
ness. The monk deserted the evil world, but de¬ 
pended upon someone from the evil deserted 
w r orld, to bring him his food. They showed me a 


20 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


huge pillar in a far country once, on which, the 
guide declared with suppressed feeling, an old 
“pillar saint” had lived for thirty years. I asked 
what he w r as doing up there, and the guide told 
me he was being holy, and I went a bit farther 
with my same question, and said, “What if he 
was holy up there?” If I had been running the 
commissary I would have stopped the provisions 
from an unholy world being hoisted to a false 
idea of holiness there, just to see how soon that 
separated holiness would come down and help 
the rest of us. They took me to a desolate dun¬ 
geon once and showed me where a so-called holy 
man of old had lived for many years in ab¬ 
solute seclusion of his own shut-in piety. After 
my guide had recited the hollow story, I troubled 
him a bit by asking, “What’s the use of being 
holy in a hole anyhow?” What we want is holy 
men and women on the streets, in the markets, 
in society, everywhere where men and women 
have to live, and work, and achieve, and suffer, 
and die. Thank God the unholy principle of an 
isolated holiness has been shaken off our religion. 
The expecting world that has heard our claims 
has, in its appreciated need, crowded up, and 
broken down the walls of the monastery, and 
demanded service. Modern life withholds sup¬ 
port from the religion that fulfills itself in idle 
seclusion, and with a rugged practical expecta¬ 
tion of real vital results comes asking the church 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


21 


to right the things that are wrong. Truth cajn- 
not be tolerant. It cannot be truth without an 
uncompromising stand. The church must change 
a wrong world. Righteousness cannot be toler¬ 
ant of unrighteousness. Whenever it endeavors 
so to do it surrenders its holiness and its mission. 

When I bring myself to look straight at the 
conditions of the life of our day; when I see with 
what eternal right the movement of the age to 
which I speak is burdened; when I lift my eyes 
to look upon the men and women to whom I am 
privileged to speak; and when I try, as I surely 
have many times tried, to calculate what results 
could be achieved if only the truth were pre¬ 
sented so that it would compel acceptance, I can 
scarce endure indecision another hour. We, who 
have been charged with living in this the most 
difficult day perhaps the world has ever stag¬ 
gered through! We who must march straight 
now into problems of living and life that throb 
with all human destiny can mean! We who have 
dared take unto ourselves the responsibility of a 
declared faith in a Christ, whose words, if they 
mean anything, must mean everything! We who 
must be judged to-morrow by a generation that 
will have the right to the inheritance of every¬ 
thing our faithfulness to-day can bring to them! 
We must be Christians now. We must not hesi¬ 
tate to match our faith against all the difficulty 
the day knows. I know these are hard days. 


22 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


But Jesus Christ never came to deliver mankind 
from the mere ennui of aimlessness. He came 
knowing we were in a storm, but knowing also 
that he was the master of wind and wave. I 
know too that your place individually is beset 
with great difficulty. But Jesus never sought 
folks to do his business who were cushioned on 
ease or lulled in the stupor of extravagance. I 
know that some of you have been, and are this 
very moment strugging hard over mere financial 
endeavor to hold on to your fortune. But I 
know' too, that sometimes Jesus had to say to 
some who sought to follow' him, that he could 
do the most with folks whose hands had been 
set free from the tyranny of their property. I 
know' this: we have God, and whatever else we 
may lack w r e are thus expectantly equipped to 
get our lives lived unto tangible results. The 
fields are ripe, dead ripe. Trouble is in the social 
w'orld. Ennui is in our literature. Disquiet and 
unrest are sweeping our business w orld. Nations 
are in turmoil. Governments that only a very 
short gone yesterday w r ere basking in a careless 
confidence that their foundations were secure, 
are to-day toppled in w r reck. Revolution is run¬ 
ning down human ranks with easy contagion. 
These are indeed days to try men’s souls. 
Strenuous days! But, after all, I confess I would 
much rather die, wracked to death by the torture 
of broken health that broke under too heavy a 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


23 


load, than to sleep my life away under the false 
influence of the dangerous anaesthetic of dawd¬ 
ling ease. 0 men and women of this big accessible 
world to-day, that looks eagerly every-whither 
for help and deliverance from its sorrows, I 
salute you, and congratulate you on your respon¬ 
sibility. Men and women of the Christian Church, 
you over whose lives have been pronounced the 
sacred vows of the great God-raised institu¬ 
tion that was established and equipped to 
match the resources of heaven against the rav¬ 
ages of hell, I congratulate you this day upon 
the eager expectation which the world has come 
now to have in you. You who possess trained 
personalities, the most vital asset any man can 
ever invest in the world’s life, you cannot do 
more with your life than to bring it with the 
enthusiasm of entire consecration to bear upon 
this great transitional era of the world to help 
it into a more dynamic faith in Jesus Christ. 
The preemption which the expectant world has 
made on the church is the compelling call to the 
men and women of large vision in such an age as 
this, not to merely sit to enjoy their liberties and 
lavish ability upon themselves for ease, but 
rather to spend themselves and to be spent in the 
service of their fellows. My heart leaped to en¬ 
couragement one night, at the close of an address 
I had made in a university. I saw coming to¬ 
ward me a great giant of a fellow, holding out 


24 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


his big hand and saying, “Do you know me?” I 
was delighted to assure him that I did, for I 
am not real safe under such questioning. I had 
not seen him for fifteen years, but I could never 
forget that face, and I answered as I grabbed his 
hand, “What are you doing here, Charlie?” He 
said doggedly, and carrying to me vividly the 
memory of what he had come out of, “I am going 
to school.” A good many years ago I saw that 
big young man converted one evening during a 
meeting I was holding in a little country church. 
He was sitting on the platform just at my feet, 
and too bashful to sit thus looking at an 
audience, he shielded his face in his hands, and 
sat listening. Suddenly, utterly unconscious of 
all others, he stood straight up, and turning said 
to me as his face beamed, “I see it,” and then 
realizing what he had done, sank with a crash 
back to his humble seat on the floor. He was 
twenty-four years of age then, and a heroic fel¬ 
low. His father had died when he was a mere 
lad, and left him with his widowed mother and 
four other children. They lived on a poor sort 
of a hillside farm, which was made doubly diffi¬ 
cult by a heavy mortgage. Charlie was a stout 
lad, and had to bend all his strength to do the 
work of the farm, and never was privileged 
another day’s schooling after his father’s death. 
But he never complained. He devoted himself 
to the task, and worked that mortgage all away, 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


25 


and in the course of the years built for his mother 
a nice new house, doing all the work with his own 
strong hands. The mother’s health broke and 
she became the victim of a long lingering disease 
that seemed to feast itself on increasing the diffi¬ 
culty for the hero boy. But Charlie kept the 
income coming in so he could care for the added 
expenses, and finally with a long hospital bill 
added to it all, he made his devoted way to the 
last day on earth of his beloved mother, and sat 
beside her to comfort her as she went home to 
God. He buried her tenderly and placed above 
her a modest marker of his affection. He then felt 
that he was free to spend the remainder of his life 
as he might choose to do. He called the other 
children together and told them there was a cer¬ 
tain amount of money in the bank, which was all 
theirs. The farm was free of all debt, and in 
good condition, and it was all theirs. He then 
announced that with only enough money in his 
pocket to pay his railroad fare to the university, 
he was going to begin his education. He was 
forty years of age. As I stood there holding his 
hand in the admiration which sprang from my 
remembrance of all this I have been telling you, 
he gripped my palm in his and said, “Mr. Rice, 
it will take me five years more to finish the col¬ 
lege work I have laid out before me, but all I 
ask is a chance to bring my life up to the very 
best I can make it, and devote it to the service 


26 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


of men for Christ’s sale.” Such a vision as 
that strong son of service had of the debt of life 
is what the world is expecting from the Chris¬ 
tian Church to-day. We must become per¬ 
meated, saturated with such devotion, and when 
it shall be so, the expectant world will be an¬ 
swered with the expected church. The unfal¬ 
tering behavior of our Lord is forever drawn 
against us by the world, as the pattern an¬ 
nounced in our Bible as the example for our 
conduct. The whole world knows Jesus Christ 
was brave. It has no toleration for cowardice 
in conduct of those who name his name and pro¬ 
fess to follow him. Jesus Christ would forever 
and everywhere stand for the right. Therefore 
all hesitation and compromise and fear of those 
who do not want righteousness so earnestly as 
to be willing to pay the full price for it, bear no 
savor of those who follow his lead. The world 
knows that there is no hope for its redemption 
any other where than from those who with a 
fearlessness of self-sacrifice will take up the 
cross and actually follow Christ, and because of 
this conviction it expects the church. The 
Church of Christ is here on duty. There is no 
escape for us who expect to vindicate our es¬ 
pousal of it, save as we throw our lives into its 
task with all our might. We must either meet 
our obligation and establish the principle of our 
religion in the life of this world or quit and get 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


27 


out of the way. The church cannot be a mere 
tolerated institution. There is no flavor of God 
in such an attitude. The incumbent obligation 
of our profession compels us to save the world. 
I would add this, therefore, as our accepted con¬ 
viction which must overleap the expectation of 
the world in us; we are obligated by our creed, 
and by every pulse of the life expressive of our 
real truth, to the largest possible service, to 
the cleanest living, to the best for man and God. 
The church has full right in every one of its 
people, a right which must respond to an expect¬ 
ant world, but a right which is founded also on 
its own deep sense of obligation, to the reflection 
of the very best there is for mankind, which 
means love and heaven and God. 


II 


THE CHUKCH OF MINIMUMS 

“Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and 
ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”—John 16. 24. 

For long now there has been tolerated about 
the world an oft-indefinite but ever-persistent 
criticism of the Christian Church, a criticism 
which presumes upon the idea as axiomatic and 
never questions, that there is something radi¬ 
cally wrong with the church. It has been an 
easy morsel to pick up and a very seemingly 
satisfactory one to roll under the tongue of 
those who would evade the claim of the church 
on them, or who would, in shielding their 
own condemnation, shuffle the blame for things 
as they are upon the shoulders of someone else. 
What'S the matter with the church? Men ask it, 
and lift their waiting ears in a confidence that 
such a question will die away in its own echoes. 
The attitude has generated foolish criticism, as 
well as foolish defense, and likewise some whole¬ 
some criticism and some wholesome defense. I 
followed carefully one quite representative 
symposium on the general theme, wherein men 
from almost every branch of church activity 
28 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 29 


joined in the common endeavor to answer the 
question, which was thus made to admit that 
there was really something seriously wrong with 
the church. With but one exception the argu¬ 
ment was made around the admission. That 
one exception argued that what we were alarmed 
over was the evidence of real life yet in the 
church, which was making heroic effort to adjust 
our activities and organizations to the new 
phases of the life of our new age. The very spirit 
of dissatisfaction at putting new wine in old bot¬ 
tles was full evidence, thought he, that we are 
with our Lord understanding the necessity of 
new bottles for the new wine of our new efforts. 
That kind of argument attracted me, and I 
thought his article was much the better article 
of the group, doubtless because of a fact we all 
appreciate, namely, that we admire the one who 
can say what we have always wished we could 
say, but had never just found the right words in 
which to frame it. I have never cared to train 
with the critics of the church. I love the church 
with all my heart, and I believe in it absolutely, 
and have a confidence in it which is founded 
upon my assurance that it is the Church of God. 
I rejoice in what the church has been and in 
what it is. I am encouraged w hen I read of what 
it has done and is doing. My heart leaps within 
me w hen I read’ the great program the church 
has had the courage to announce. I would not 


30 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


be blind, nor do I believe I have been, to the evi¬ 
dences of the imperfections, nor to the places 
of repair which are necessary. I try always to 
discover the points of need, that it may be pos¬ 
sible for even me, the least among her servants, 
to help God’s church to the extent of my ability, 
to a better and a fuller victory. We are in our 
whole generation endangered from what Mr. 
Chesterton has called in one of his essays “the 
negative spirit.” There are men and women 
whose proof of scholarship is only exposed in 
mere criticism. They have come forward to ask 
the question, “What is the matter with the 
church?” with such an inflection that it car¬ 
ries its own answer. In fact, the question of it 
has largely been dropped now, and it has come 
to be rather a bold manner of declaring that the 
church is well beyond repair; its task is undone, 
and can never hope to be done by the church. 
Men have surrounded the church, and with their 
implicating questions have demanded its sur¬ 
render. It becomes us to look very carefully at 
much of the criticism of the church to-day, for it 
savors of blind destruction, and would not lead 
to correction of wrongs so much as it would to 
the destruction of our finest hopes. In Chester¬ 
ton’s introduction to his book Heretics, he tells 
of a great commotion which had arisen in the 
street over a lamp-post which some influential 
folks desired to tear down. During the discus- 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 31 


sion, or, rather, clamor, which attended the en¬ 
deavor, there came by a gray-clad monk who 
was asked for his opinion of the matter, and he 
answered in the arid manner of schoolmen: “Let 
ns, first of all, my brethren, consider the real 
value of light. If light be in itself good”—and 
he got no further, for someone knocked him 
down at that point, and the crowd rushed upon 
the lamp-post and pulled it dow T n, as they did so 
congratulating themselves on their genuine prac¬ 
ticability. But when they began to analyze the 
many various reasons the crowd had for pulling 
down the lamp-post, they found themselves in a 
new and vigorous war in the night, no man 
knowing whom he struck in the dark; and the 
author declared that gradually but inevitably 
there came over that crowd the conviction that it 
did all depend on the philosophy of light, only 
what they might have discussed under the gas- 
lamp that may not have been perfect, but which 
gave some light, they now must discuss in the 
dark. That little introductory story of Chester¬ 
ton’s has long interested me. Let us make sure 
we know why they w T ant to pull the lamp-post 
down. For the real thing the matter with the 
church to some may have utterly no more mean¬ 
ing than that its presence is a menace to their 
w r ays of doing business here on earth. 

In all the discussions I have read or listened 
to on this quite common subject, the most sug- 


32 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


gestive and vital one to me was a short editorial 
which made its appearance in one of our Ameri¬ 
can religious journals some time since, under the 
title I have chosen for this sermon—“The Church 
of Minimums.” The editor phrased, in that 
statement, the very thing I have been trying to 
phrase for long. We are suffering in the Church 
of Christ on earth to-day from the fatal habit 
of the minimum. We are fearful of our task. 
We have forever looked at our commission with 
the fearful eyes of the disciples when the multi¬ 
tude followed them away from the ordinary 
sources of supply, and, sure that they had no 
other resource, they begged the Master to send 
the crowd away. It has been often the experi¬ 
ence of Christ with his church that he has been 
compelled to force the use of his own availabil¬ 
ity upon us, by feeding the impossible crowd 
with a boy’s lunch. The habit of the minimum 
has cramped us. Individuals suffer under it. 
The church as a whole has allowed its story to 
be written in its smalling influence, if I may be 
allowed a word of my own make, to express it. 
The thraldom of this tendency to minimize our 
expressions in the world as Christians, stands 
to-day a serious affliction. I chafe under it. 
We would snatch from the world one of its chief 
objections to our whole work to-day, if we would 
but cut our patterns larger. Abraham went out 
not knowing whither he went, and one of the 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 33 


very great goers of the human story answered 
him with a long, long echo across the ages when 
he declared a man never went so far nor so nobly 
as he did w T hen he went not knowing whither he 
went. There is an old, very old story, that has 
been used so much for illustration that its illus¬ 
tration is about worn through, of the young 
artist Raphael, who in a crisis of his artistic 
career had one day stepped out of his studio and 
left some sketches on which he was working. 
Angelo came in, and picking up some sketching 
crayon hurriedly drew around each sketch a 
larger outline, and wrote under it all, “Amplius” 
The story goes, of course, that this was what 
really made Raphael. I don’t know how true the 
story is, but I know it is a good, and that’s the 
reason it is now a well-worn story. The princi¬ 
ple contained seems to be the need of the day. 
We do not await Angelo’s coming, but we do 
await the long too-small Raphael to recognize 
the larger sketch that has been drawn about his 
cramped endeavor. Here is the sketch long set 
before us, and surely it should blaze in daring 
proportions before the church to-day that stands 
faced with expectation in every need the world 
develops. “Is not this the fast that I have 
chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo 
the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go 
free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to 
deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring 


34 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


the poor that are cast out to thy house? when 
thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and 
that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? 
Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, 
and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and 
thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory 
of the Lord shall be thy rereward. . . . And if thou 
draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the 
afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in ob¬ 
scurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day: 
and the Lord shall guide thee continually. . . . 
And they that shall be of thee shall build the 
old waste places: thou shall raise up the founda¬ 
tions of many generations; and thou shalt be 
called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer 
of paths to dwell in.” That sounds like “amplius” 
to me. It is from the clear, pointed pen of 
Isaiah. You cannot read it and fail to feel the 
enlargement set before us for greater things than 
we have even dared announce as our plans. We 
are straitened in our purposes. We are trying 
to run the church too much on the least possible 
basis. We are constantly accustomed to hear¬ 
ing all our plans discussed on the minimum. We 
are impoverished with an extravagant economy. 
I submit that it does not savor of the Church of 
God. We cannot expect to effectually represent 
a great God on a diminishing basis. 

I propose now to make divisional use for 
this address in the points the editor made. He 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 35 


touched a most essential matter before us, and 
one which I am sure has been at the heart of 
every preacher these days, when he said, We are 
suffering to-day from the minimum habit of be¬ 
lief. It seems to be the accepted fashion of our 
day to believe just as little as possible. There 
seems to be a quite general conviction that the 
church should come very close to the world in 
what it believes, and that in the shading over of 
belief, the church must do all the shading. Don’t 
be very large in this matter of belief! All this 
has doubtless had strong tendency to create to¬ 
day a marked carelessness about the defined 
statements of the eternal truth committed to our 
care. It has come to be a common question to 
ask, and I bought a book titled with the question, 
“Does it Matter What a Man Believes?” It is a 
blood-letting question, and the secret of many 
souls’ invalided condition to-day lies in the fact 
that they have endeavored to keep life on so 
lifeless terms. Our religion has been reduced 
to meaningless phrases so: often. I am calling 
now, in a day that is under the strain of life at 
the highest pressure it has ever known, for a 
religion that will drink largely of the accessible 
truths of our God. “My soul panteth after thee, 
O God!” “As the hart panteth after the water- 
brooks, so panteth my soul after thee.” This is 
no day to endeavor to believe just as little as pos¬ 
sible and still be called Christians. Such a 


36 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


measure of belief may keep us just alive, but 
these are poor days for folks to meet with the 
consciousness that all their strength is needed 
merely to keep living. The maximum of belief is 
what gives life the swing of triumph. The whole 
church needs to breathe largely of that fact to¬ 
day. We have great fundamentals written in 
our Book which are not to be held lightly; in 
fact, they cannot be held any other way than 
heroically. All down the long story of the faith 
we profess has been written the fact of the hero¬ 
ism of the believers. It has not been an easy 
thing to come on down the story of history and 
cling to our faith. The darkest corners of that 
story have been lighted with the fires where 
burned the noble men and women who held faith 
above life. Lord Bacon has onewhere a phrase 
that interests me, in which he speaks of “bed¬ 
ridden truths.” How well it tells the story! 
Truths that are ineffectually realized. Dr. Wat- 
kinson has suggested “a sick ward for impotent 
beliefs”—a place where anaemic sentiments and 
paralytic and crippled purposes could be put to 
bed. We are troubled in the whole world’s ap¬ 
preciation of Christianity with those who are 
lightly termed, “nominal Christians.” I do not 
know what a nominal Christian is. I have asked 
many audiences if there were any nominal Chris¬ 
tians present, and thus far I have not had one 
response. But the diluted idea of Christianity 


THE CHURCH OF MINXMUMS 37 


has gotten such hold upon many that it has 
made itself seriously noticeable. Such phantom 
belief cannot get our great task done. When I 
set my face honestly to look at the great program 
that is drawn before us, I know it cannot be 
done without great faith in God. There are 
some words written in the Bible which tell of 
noble souls who wrought with undeniable 
strength for the cause, “Who through faith 
subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, ob¬ 
tained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge 
of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, 
waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the 
armies of the aliens.” That sounds like a church 
at maximum. That is what belief in God means. 
Faith, conviction, enthusiasm, sacrifice, heroism 
—the victory that overcometh self, sin, and the 
world. We are calling for a profound faith. We 
need now a belief that will force its undisputed 
way into our thought, experience, and conduct; 
a belief that will command our understandings, 
and kindle all our powers to help realize its 
ideals. We must believe God, and have the cour¬ 
age to recognize that we cannot carry the word 
“minimum” and stay with Him. There is no 
place for minimums in belief in an omnipotent 
God. If we believe at all, we believe. We can¬ 
not forever trim such belief to little ideals. Set 
as we are to the most overwhelming task that 


38 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


was ever intrusted to any institution on earth, 
and professing as we do an allegiance to the God 
of it all, we must believe largely and act largely. 
That means maximum faith for the church of 
maximums, and that is the Church of God. 

The second characteristic minimum of to-day 
the editor noted was the minimum of experience. 
He declared there was a willingness to have some 
Christian experience, but a great care that it 
take no chances at being overdone. “Christ 
offers his disciples a divine companionship, a 
companionship which will defeat temptation, 
pull sin up by the roots, and conquer the evil 
trends of character. But the church with pain¬ 
ful caution seeks only so much of that compan¬ 
ionship as will not overdo the effect. It does 
not desire the result to be too conspicuous. It 
consents to be good, but dreads to be holy.” Re¬ 
gardless of whatever defense any of us may 
choose to make against such a statement, the fact 
remains that the church of to-day is painfully 
low on Christian experience. What power and 
Christian motive there is in experience! This 
is a serious accusation the editor has brought 
against us, if it be true, that we are trying to 
discover what is the least we can take of Christ 
in experience without refusing him altogether. 
What we are in bold need of now is a willingness 
unto abandon, that will with confident heart 
accept our Lord’s mastery in life with all the 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 39 


consequences it may involve. We are offered an 
experience which will not falter before whatever 
need this day, or any possible day, may bring; 
an experience that will completely save us from 
the power of passion, and the sirocco of selfish¬ 
ness, and will effectually empower us to live 
positively in purity and in service; an experience 
that will not desert us in the day of fiercest temp¬ 
tation, but will actually in that day furnish us 
with the realization of that promised deliverance 
that has been clearly written down for us to 
believe if we will trust him in every temptation; 
an experience that will stand beside us with 
strong arm in the day of great trouble and sor¬ 
row, and will furnish sure consolation to our 
stricken hearts. Who that knows men and 
women to-day can have failed to appreciate the 
fact that just such an experience is what the 
world needs now? We suffer at every restraint 
that is ever put upon genuine Christian experi¬ 
ence. One of the very finest and most impressive 
stories that was told along the lines in the Great 
War was about a fine young Italian soldier who 
refused to desert his badly wounded lieutenant, 
but, in spite of all his efforts, had to see the 
officer actually die in his arms. He threw him¬ 
self across the lifeless body and cried in the over¬ 
whelming loss he had sustained and under the 
impression that all were gone, “Even the King 
has gone away.” Just then he was roused by a 


40 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


hand on his shoulder, and he arose and stood at 
attention. “My dear boy,” said the King, “my 
car has gone, but the King is still with you.” The 
little story was told with much feeling among the 
soldiers, and carried well the point they wished 
to drive deep into the souls of tried men. But 
it is a mere lisping of the great fact which Jesus 
Christ, divine Companion of men and women 
and little children, has been living into eloquence 
all down the centuries. The King is not gone; 
Life cannot drive him away, Death cannot drive 
him away. The experience of the living, ever¬ 
present Saviour of men is the privilege of us all. 

Let me note one more and the concluding point 
the editor made. We are suffering, said he, from 
the minimum of trust. There seems to be a 
strange feeling about among men, that we are 
actually afraid to match our religion against 
the most difficult things of our day. There may 
be here and there a hard case to whom the min¬ 
istry of Christianity is effectual, but somehow 
we don’t carry a positive expectation that the 
hardest cases are just as easy to our professed 
allegiance with omnipotence as are the easier 
cases. I think it w r as Phillips Brooks who said 
onewhere, that he could not just calculate what 
difficulty might mean to omnipotence. If he 
didn’t say that, it should be said, so I will say it 
now. Anyhow, it is time the w r orld was given 
the full experience of contact with a church that 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 41 


actually brings trust in an omnipotent God to 
the task in hand. Down the years of my minis¬ 
try comes the memory of a most distressing case 
of an outspoken sinner who lived near a little 
country church where I was a young pastor. 
The man hated the church, and could not toler¬ 
ate its services as he knew them, and the very 
presence of a modest little church building in his 
neighborhood was a continuous distraction to 
his soul. He was dreaded as a terror by all the 
church people. He took delight in doing every¬ 
thing he could do to make church services hard. 
He esteemed it his high duty to break the win¬ 
dows out of that little church with painful regu¬ 
larity. One day to emphasize his hatred he even 
broke the window sashes, and made the repair 
bill doubly large. Everyone was afraid of him. 
They feared to make complaint, because they 
knew he would quickly transfer his persecution 
to a personal application. When I came into the 
neighborhood he w r as the first man I heard about. 
The folks awaited wdiat would be done as the 
introduction for a change of preachers. I began 
a revival meeting, and one day asked some of the 
brethren if anyone had ever spoken to that old 
man about religion. They were all dumfounded 
at such an idea ever having been thought of. 
“There is no use talking about him,” was the 
unanimous verdict. “The Lord may graciously 
save some of our young folks,” but for him there 


42 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


was not even a far dream of the most fanatical 
enthusiast about there ever cherished. Well, I 
proposed, since he had never been approached, 
that we try our trust in God and at least ask him 
to be a Christian. I confess I was a bit timid 
the day my proposition had cornered me and 
forced me to give it a trial. I drove up to his 
farm with some misgivings, but I did drive up. 
I found the old barbed-wire gate was down, and 
without getting out of my buggy I drove in, and 
saw just before me, sitting under a tree, and all 
alone, the man I had heard so much of and whom 
I could not fail to recognize, though I had never 
seen him before. I checked my horse and said, 
“Brother, I understand your little girl is sick, 
and I wondered if there was anything we could 
do that might be of help or comfort to any of 
you.” 

He looked straight at me and said, “Are you 
the new preacher?” 

I said: “Well, never mind that. I came over 
to see if there was any service we might render 
you.” 

He was very fond of that little girl, and said 
at once and in most cordial manner, “Won’t you 
come in the house?” 

I need not here continue the story. I will only 
say there never has been a bill for broken win¬ 
dows at that little country church since. But 
it is so easy for us to think our religion may be 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 43 


effectual to a few best-chosen cases, but must not 
be ventured on the hardest cases we know. We 
are putting our reservations, and not God’s who¬ 
soever, against our task. No wonder we hesitate. 
No wonder we so often find what we call defeat 
when we dare so fearfully with the great weapon 
of our trust. God cannot afford to give victory to 
any endeavor that represents him so small to 
the great things that are before us. Here is a 
wonderfully vital word from the editorial which 
has inspired this address, and which summary 
and conclusion I have carried close to the heart 
of my efforts ever since I read it: “If we believe 
a little about Christ, take only a little of Christ, 
do only a little for Christ, and rely only a little 
on Christ, we can at least feel shame to be satis¬ 
fied with such littles.” It is time the world was 
given the shock of a church upon it, and ming¬ 
ling in all its life, that has a large trust in an 
omnipotent God. We are not here asking tolera¬ 
tion. We are not here making a survey of world 
problems. We are here to save the world. We 
have been equipped of God for the task; we need, 
therefore, have no concern as to the resource¬ 
fulness of our equipment. We only need to see 
to it that more of God shall be in all our en¬ 
deavors. The church will never compel the con¬ 
fidence of the world in her work while she is con¬ 
tent to do things in so computed and mathemati¬ 
cal and logical and human ways as have an easy 


44 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


expression, among us just now. Every other 
institution can do that. Ordinary bakeries will 
take contracts to feed multitudes when there is 
evident plenty of material. None but God will 
dare tell the crowd to sit down before one little 
lunch basket. Just as long as we do things 
along the ordinary lines of human calculations— 
and there are many things we are to do thus— 
just as long as we do only so, we must accept 
our rating as a human agency. The church 
faces that fact in the verdict of the whole world 
to-day. There is no other possible line before 
us, if we would keep keenly our sense of God, 
than to attempt that which makes us feel through 
and through our absolute need of the Almighty 
and by an unfaltering trust in him see it accom¬ 
plished. God can with our minimum of trust 
save us perhaps, yet so as by fire. But all that 
sounds only to me like the salvation of escape 
and as a Christian on this earth I cannot meas¬ 
ure my salvation so. With a maximum of trust, 
and a daring program which such trust would 
impose, the world could ere this have been saved. 
We have been and are still at it, trying to save 
the world on a minimum of endeavor, and while 
we may have done encouragingly well in some 
lines of judgment, I still contend we have by no 
means been getting what the world waits to see. 
How many times the question has come leaping 
out of our halting endeavors at us all: Why, 


THE CHURCH OF MINIMUMS 45 


oh why does the conquest of the world by Christ 
halt so badly? Why have we not long ago taken 
the kingdoms of this world for our Christ? If 
we are his church, why have we not seen more 
outstanding signs of his power among us? Then 
we remember what we have brought him. Our 
minimums stand out. The world needs and 
awaits a church with God manifest in partner¬ 
ship with its maximum ability. We have sub¬ 
jected the Church of God to the judgment among 
men founded on the minimum of our efforts too 
long already. Any other than infinite patience 
and love would have turned from a friendship 
fed upon desperation’s measure, long, long ago. 
The times are indeed ripe for a larger demon¬ 
stration of our faith. Let us hasten to take up 
the march of our conquest on the largest meas¬ 
ure. I want ever in my religion that abounding 
confidence and that daring boldness which must 
be the outcome of the fact that God has been 
received into the fullest measure of my life. I 
want to feel that I have really brought my 
maximum for investment. We cannot hope to 
save the w r orld with a religion founded on our 
littlenesses. It would not be fair to us. It would 
not be fair to the world. It would not be fair to 
God. Minimums cannot be tolerated in the 
church for to-day. The beckon of this difficult 
hour is for strong men and women. It is the 
sublime challenge of a great opportunity. We 


46 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


must not* we dare not fail. No business this 
world ever offered to any man can compare in 
return to the dividends offered by the Church of 
God. I challenge your already well-formed con- 
victions with the appeal of the hour. I call to a 
big privilege, for big souls, to do big things. 
My soul leaps at the idea. We must not repre¬ 
sent a great God on a diminishing basis in such a 
day as this. May God help us to drive all our 
minimums from the task. We must have maxi- 
mums of belief, experience, service, and trust, 
and maximums will warrant maximums, and, 
God with us, will save the world. 


Ill 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 

“Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them 
also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there 
shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”—John 10. 16. 

The constituency of the Church of Jesus 
Christ has long been one of the points of conten¬ 
tion by folks who would arrogate to themselves 
an exclusive right to definition. The contention 
has not arisen because our Lord was not clear 
in his intentions. It has always arisen because 
the church has not been able to climb up to the 
full-visioned conception of the real relationship 
of the common race of mankind. Throughout 
the ministry of our Lord and Master, in his well- 
planned training of the chosen twelve, and even 
after his departure from his incarnated presence 
here; all through the effort of Jesus in the train¬ 
ing of his church and people, he has sought to 
present an enlarged conception of the Kingdom. 
He came the universal Man among the Jews. 
The very thought is collision. The Jew could 
not be universal. He was the outstanding type 
of the clannish idea. He liked it too. He was 
a Jew first, he was also intentioned of being a 
Jew last. He was a Jew. His whole nation’s 
47 


48 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


history had been written in exclusive terms of 
separation. His separation from other races had 
been the essential principle of his development, 
and was used of God to save the Jews to God a 
separate and peculiar people. All this had been 
faithfully taught from generation to generation 
among them in proud confidence of God’s fav¬ 
oritism, and brought with it a most bigoted and 
narrow individual as well as race. The Jew 
having been so long a special object of separa¬ 
tion and care, had forgotten to interpret the fact 
as being a process of preparation for service, 
and instead, had come to glory in the fact with 
an easily understood pride, as an eloquent and 
not-to-be-overlooked evidence of God’s special 
favor to him. The Jews were God’s chosen 
people, not his favorites. That is an outstand¬ 
ing difference. They were chosen, in order to 
drill into them a condition of life and ideals, 
with which they might be used for the great pur¬ 
pose of the true religion among men. Because 
the Jew failed utterly to rightly interpret his 
choosing, there resulted in his character that 
nature which has been most difficult to remove, 
and which has made him a whole world’s prob¬ 
lem ever since. He was chosen to serve; he 
thought he was chosen to receive. He was chosen 
to become chief minister to the world; he mistook 
his choosing as favoritism. The hardest thing 
Jesus Christ had to do in the training of his 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


49 


disciples, and, indeed, a thing he never did suc¬ 
ceed during his human life in doing for them, 
was to remove their narrow conceptions of God’s 
kingdom and bring them to see that in God’s 
sight mankind is the aim and goal, rather than 
any one lesser race among the great whole. 
Judaism completely missed the mission of our 
Lord as expression of God’s love, and when 
they found that he had not come to restore their 
distinct nationality, and plant their racial ban¬ 
ner on a new exalted place, and erect a high 
throne on which a Jew would sit consummate 
among all the sons of men, then they were dis¬ 
appointed in him, and grieved in their long-re¬ 
strained expectation, and were ready to crucify 
him and number him also among their enemies. 

As I study as written here in the Book, and 
hear voiced in the early story of the Church, the 
choking influence of the selfishness characteris¬ 
tic of these special agents of our Lord’s work, 
I am made to feel that the great work thus far 
largely essential to the progress of the King¬ 
dom has been the expansion of the hearts of its 
devotees. One of the most outstanding reasons, 
perhaps the most outstanding of all the reasons, 
why the church has not spread in its great work 
into the world’s life more than it has, lies in the 
fact that we, as members of it, have never in 
proper manner appreciated what it is really 
trying to do. The Kingdom of God was not 


50 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


established on this earth for Jews. Conditions 
did, however, make it essential to establish it 
through them. The church has not been set on 
this earth for any class or race, or color, or 
nation of people. It was planted here by the 
infinite love of our God for the purpose of reach¬ 
ing and saving the whole human race. 

Let us now, before proceeding to the applica¬ 
tion of our text to the thesis we have chosen, 
look to a correction in the wording of it, in order 
that we may clearly distinguish the contention 
of Jesus, whose words we are using. I read 
the text in the familiar phrases of the Authorized 
Version. It has been so long and so well known 
that the seemingly slight change in it, in the 
Revised Version, lacks a startle that will im¬ 
press the fact of the great difference carried. 
This is one of the most unfortunate passages 
of all the sayings of Jesus in the old version, 
w hich, because of the mistranslation of one word, 
has fastened into the memory of a multitude the 
basis for an argument w hich never did exist in 
the passage as rendered by our Lord. The 
trouble in the verse hinges on the mistaken 
rendering of an important w 7 ord, and the whole 
bearing of the passage changes in application 
w r hen the correct translation is put there. In 
the first part of the verse the w r ord “fold” 
appears and is the correct translation of the 
Greek w T ord ovXt] (atiile). “Other sheep have I 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


51 


which are not of this fold.” The last part of 
the verse has again made use of the word “fold.” 
This word is incorrectly translated from an en¬ 
tirely different Greek word nolfivTi (poimne), 
which word never means fold, or inclosure, but 
always and everywhere means “flock.” All the 
revised versions carry this significant change. 
But people read the revised versions but little, 
and upon first sight the meaning of the change 
makes no impress upon their attention. This, 
however, is one of the most significant correc¬ 
tions, in my judgment, in the entire revision of 
the Bible. It is fundamental. The idea of Jesus 
was misrepresented in the old version. There 
is a distinct difference in the meaning of the 
words “flock” and “fold” as words descriptive of 
the character of Christ’s church. Founded on 
this false translation of “fold” the Roman 
Catholic interpretation has built up a false argu¬ 
ment for the unity of the church as they have 
chosen to define unity. But Jesus, in this rarely 
beautiful passage, was saying nothing of that 
thing. There may be many folds. “Other sheep 
I have which are not of this fold.” But there is 
just one flock. There may be many denomina¬ 
tions. That has nothing whatever to do with the 
fact of the common flock. This is the doctrine 
of Protestantism, and to insist upon an organic 
and outward unity as essential to the reality of 
the church is simply romanizing in its principle. 


52 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


Let us now, with this significant correction, 
study the plain application it has to the real 
meaning of our task and to the interpretation 
of the church in the world. God has patiently 
waited, across long and oft-trying centuries, for 
mankind to realize the true conception of man. 
Everywhere in the ministry and words of Jesus 
we are given the argument that the kingdom of 
God is not exclusive but inclusive. There could 
never be a program of world intention launched 
on an exclusive claim. The very idea is self-con- 
tradictory. Upon the rigid characters of his Jew¬ 
ish disciples, whose convictions and ideals had 
been laid by long exclusive conceptions, Jesus 
was compelled to spend much careful effort, to 
bring them to appreciate the human vision. God 
has always had trouble with little men. It is 
hard to get great human facts into a race clan¬ 
nishness. The curse of the olden times was nar¬ 
rowness. The hindering curse of the present day 
is still narrowness. We have not yet gotten up 
to the complete acceptance of all the conse¬ 
quences of the ideals Jesus came to establish. I 
incline to believe it was exactly for this reason 
that Jesus chose his disciples almost entirely 
from among the commoner people of his day. 
Had he called them from among the rich or the 
learned classes, the poor and ignorant would 
have been discouraged. When he sought them 
from among the poorer and more humble walks 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


53 


of life, and placed thus there the dignity of 
religion’s real call, then all those above could 
not doubt their ability too, and all the poor 
besides took courage. Thus humble men were 
called to the constructive work of the inclusive 
Kingdom, and the measure of that inclusion was 
their message. 

You cannot read the hopeful call of this great 
gospel, and fail to appreciate that the figures 
used here to apply it are always inclusive figures, 
and never exclusive. The fishermen who were 
called from a tiny inland lake and sent out to 
catch men for God were given a line to fling as 
deep as humanity could ever be found. There is 
an essential change in the idea of the Kingdom 
as expressed in the Old Testament when we 
find it as used in the New Testament. The old 
idea w T as in a manner beautiful, and had some¬ 
what of comfort connected with it, providing 
we found ourselves included. It was not, how¬ 
ever, large enough. Its comfort was like unto 
that which seeks to be satisfied, when a great 
storm sweeps, and when terror howls at the 
corners of the casements, and we pull our chairs 
close to the fireplace and congratulate ourselves 
that we are not out. That is a small comfort, 
but is one way comfortable. That was a close 
locked-door idea permitted to be used by the 
prophets, who conveyed the Word to an exclusive 
nation. The Old Testament is largely concerned 


54 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


with the guarding and defending of a people. 
They must be walled round. They must know 
the security of the fold. The term commonly 
used was interpreted thus, and those officially 
to care for them were set to ministries of exclu¬ 
sion. The preferred confidence of a chosen people 
was built upon that national sense. Outsiders 
were outsiders, and must wear the fierce names 
which enemies of the flock were known by— 
wolves, bears, dogs. The self-complacent secur¬ 
ity of the favored fold made all those who found 
themselves included therein believe that all they 
had to do, in order to insure eternal safety, was 
to remain carefully within that fold, and that 
was their great ideal. There was no great burn¬ 
ing sense of a mission to the world. Their idea 
was to make sure their own safety. The Jew 
was no missionary. He is no missionary. His 
hope was the fold. The salvation of a church 
that was merely waiting for the Messiah to come 
was to be most surely found in carefully re¬ 
maining within itself. Let this be a warning 
fact, clear before a modern effort that -insists, 
these great expectant days of ours, on keeping 
again its eyes fixed on the clouds of heaven 
whence he has gone, and needs again an angel 
to startle them from the stagnant peril of gazing, 
“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into 
the heavens?” The New Testament has brought 
us a new church which is to be saved in its mis- 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


55 


sion. The defense it feels is the performance of 
its task. The exclusiveness of olden times must 
be broken from, and the work must be done on 
inclusive lines, and Jesus says, “There are many 
folds, but one flock.” Great inclusive opened 
doors are these words now. They open out with 
invitation and full room for all men. The text 
we read marks the very point of the change of 
the idea. Otherwhere in his words Jesus 
changes the whole figure. He makes onewhere 
the figure of the world as a great field to be 
sown and calls his disciples to go and scatter 
the seed. He tells us again that his Kingdom 
will find a likeness in the idea of the world as 
a great sea full of fish, and his disciples are 
fishermen. Again he says his Kingdom is like 
unto a great feast, and the giver of the feast is 
solicitous even unto compulsion for enough 
guests to fill his house. You cannot fail to see 
the entire change of symbolism for the church. 
The Church of Jesus Christ must face frankly 
the fact of its commission. It is not called now 
to find a salvation of mere refuge. It is com¬ 
missioned to experience the salvation of service. 
In the light now of this complete change of pur¬ 
pose let us note the meaning of two terms of 
our text. 

1. There shall be one flock. The reason I have 
approached this seemingly simple fundamental 
word with the carefully laid distinction I have 


56 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


made is that it is the rock on which much mis¬ 
taken emphasis has been laid with another idea. 
Church union, on the smaller lines of the 
obliteration of all denominationalism, has tried 
for a false defense here. This was not said to 
so small ideals. This is a plain foundational 
statement of our Lord about the tremendous and 
common w T ork of Christ on human character. 
There has been left to the world a beautifully 
effective testimony in the eloquent case of David 
Mendel, a Jew and direct relative of the great 
musician Mendelssohn. He experienced a re¬ 
markable and transforming conversion to Chris¬ 
tianity, and in a most impressive and reverential 
manner gave up the name he had received by 
inheritance across the years, and compounded 
for himself a new name from the Greek language, 
and called himself henceforth Meander,” mean¬ 
ing a new man. Jesus Christ has been creating 
a new race in this world. Not that he has 
intended, nor that it would be desirable, for the 
real distinctions of personality or nationality to 
be abolished. We will still have many different 
men, but one Common Man. I am sure I can 
detect the evidences of that much to be desired 
condition taking shape now, even amid the fogs 
and gloom and smoke and sorrow of this great 
war-trampled day of ours. Christians of all 
races, lands, conditions are to form this one 
great common flock, for they are all in Christ. 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


57 


One flock, where we cannot be Jew, Gentile, 
Greek, barbarian, bond or free, for we are all one 
in him. The particular and outstanding enmity 
between the Jew and the Gentile, which was 
nursed by the Jew as though it were a virtue, is 
keenly representative of the great divisioning 
facts that have been forever breaking mankind 
asunder. It wms with full insight of his divine 
vision that Jesus set himself squarely against 
that thing. Such divisions run themselves deep 
into the foundations of life. It was no little 
temporary quarrel our Lord concerned himself 
with. The Jew, with his emphasis upon his own 
divinely chosen distinction, carried a proud 
head toward Gentile society. The real grace 
that could meet that condition and conquer it 
was such as must carry the healing for a world. 
And here stands our Lord in this perfectly 
simple and impressive manner telling us the 
great truth that shall yet tie a whole world 
together. Those men to whom he then spoke 
did not understand it. We have come on, almost 
two thousand years, stumbling much, but mak¬ 
ing some progress, and still we do not grasp the 
truth. But I do believe, as never before, the 
church is catching step with this great human 
truth. We will be marching triumphantly with 
it yet. The people of all the earth are stirring 
themselves to a realization of brotherhood. It 
is but dimly outlined as yet in their ideals, but, 


58 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


though slowly, nevertheless surely, mankind is 
feeling its earnest way toward a genuine unity. 
The great common note is getting its tone to 
the whole world’s ear. From the dense forests 
of the untouched continent of Africa, and the 
level steppes of the bleak Russian frontier, and 
the crowding sorrows of eastern Asia’s millions, 
and the blood-red fields of Europe’s war-tram¬ 
pled nations, and the busy marts of our own 
America’s eager energy—somehow, I say, some¬ 
how this great human race is staggering on; 
sometimes running, sometimes on broken knees 
of stumbling purpose, but forever coming on. 
We are making our common way to the light 
of human unity, and Jesus Christ, Son of God, 
Son of man, stands ever just before us pointing 
out the way. There shall be one flock! There 
shall be one flock! May God make those of us 
who have dared the name of Christian worthy 
to wear that name to-day. This is the greatest 
day the world has ever known, in which to pro¬ 
fess such a faith. It is a day when men realize 
keenly the things that are really hindering the 
progress of brotherhood. It is not our work to 
make poor men rich, nor rich men poor. Our 
Master refused most forcefully one day to have 
anything to do with even the dividing of an in¬ 
heritance, which was brought to him in appeal. 
That is not the matter in which we are to con¬ 
cern ourselves as an activity of our religion. But 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


59 


it is a very essential thing that such matters as 
these shall make no difference whatever in our 
judgment of and dealings with men. There are 
many things doubtless that we can do which will 
offer the ministry of kindly interest. Most 
surely, whatever the church can do in every 
ministry of real service, in Christ’s name it must 
do. The Son of God is our peace, and in our 
hearts we must be the genuine sons of peace. 
The secret of the only true union lies in the 
meeting together of all the sons of men in our 
common good. His church is commissioned and 
destined to become the home of the human 
family, the universal liberator, instructor, and 
reconciler of all the nations. Some great glad 
day there will come the time when this divine 
Master shall sit enthroned in the loyal worship 
of the federated people of all the earth, and there 
shall be one flock. 

2. My second observation is, “There shall be 
one Shepherd.” The Shepherd himself says so. 
There is at once in this figure the advanced idea 
which is to be characteristic of Christ’s church 
as a flock rather than as a fold. I was reading 
somewhere recently a little note of a traveler in 
Palestine who became interested in what he 
thought was a peculiar construction of the com¬ 
mon sheepfolds in the neighborhood of Hebron. 
The folds were made in the form of a letter C. 
They were crudely made often, as a mere encir- 


60 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


cling wall, not joined together and having no 
door or gate. The traveler* asked in a simple 
inquisitive manner of an old shepherd he met 
one day beside the fold, why they never have any 
doors; and was answered quickly and naturally 
and without any quotation marks, nor knowl¬ 
edge that he was quoting, “I am the door.” He 
meant by his simple reply, which to all of us 
to-day who treasure his words, as specially 
precious and meaningful from the sayings of the 
Great Shepherd, just what he said and which 
our Lord was himself doubtless quoting in figure. 
He meant that literally he did at night wrap his 
simple blanket about his shoulders and actually 
lie down in that open space of the wall to guard 
it. He, the shepherd, was the door—the door 
both of defense and privilege. He preserved 
both their going out and their coming in, and 
that too is scriptural. The Shepherd that doors 
that fold in defense writes in the Book also that 
he leadeth them out. There cannot be known 
the real meaning of a shepherd at the entrance 
of the fold. The mere security idea is not the 
full interpretation he deserves. The church has 
suffered across much misunderstood history, 
when it has been made as ideal in its defense. 
That was the idea which grew monasticism. It 
built high walls and hid itself inside its own life, 
in order to be saved. All this was in no manner 
a fair display of Christian purpose. The com- 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


61 


mission of the church was not in that idea. 
There could be no thought of a commission when 
the one dominant endeavor was to shut itself 
in with itself. All such ideals of devotional life 
as showed themselves in the many manifestations 
of monasticism were nothing other than pious 
posing self-indulgence. Jesus Christ has never 
set the translation of his shepherding care 
around seclusive defense. His followers were 
to go forth into the world, there to find their 
safety in the presence of their attending Shep¬ 
herd. A church established in a world where 
evil has an ever aggressive program, cannot 
justify itself in a mere exercise of its own safety. 
There must come upon the church which is to 
save the world from evil the sense of a security 
which will boldly leave the walls of the fold, and 
venture anywhere in the confidence of the real 
presence of the Shepherd. Surely, this great 
crusading day of ours, when ideas are fighting 
everywhere for regnancy among men, and when 
the transitional era is offering the opportunity 
of real impress to every really vital ideal, this 
is no time for the church of the living God to 
put its ideal before venturing, crusading men 
and nations in terms of a sheepfold. We await, 
rather, the appreciation of the stride of a cru¬ 
sade in the leadership of One who can both lead 
and guard. Is it not an inspiring phrase this 
great leader of ours has set for himself long ago, 


62 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


to come to its crusading interpretation in this 
day, when the brotherhood of man is pounding 
out its hard but determined way to appreciation 
in all the world, the phrase of kindly, aggressive 
help—“One Shepherd”? That one Shepherd, we 
now see, is to become the great world-tie to bind 
all the sheep into one common flock. Let us, 
therefore, now be brave enough to be Christians. 
That is the world’s solution. There is only one 
figure that has arisen upon this world’s life that 
has been big enough to be recognized as human 
rather than racial. I remember across the years 
hearing Bishop Quayle tell a plain story of a 
preacher in a foreign land waiting on a dock to 
take a ship. He could not speak one word of 
the language of the people there. In vain did 
he try to find some basis of conversation with 
one who stood near, and sought also to speak. 
He finally drew from his pocket a Testament, 
and pointed to the w T ord Jesus. They both 
looked at the name. It could be read by each. 
They looked into each others eyes, and reached 
out to shake friendly hands. Utter strangers a 
moment before, they then walked along the wharf 
together and sang together, one in Portuguese 
and one in English, a common song of the com¬ 
mon Shepherd. Jesus Christ is the credential 
of the world’s unity. The curse and constant 
sorrow of our world is its cliques and classes 
and divisions. May God forgive us that we have 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


63 


seen so little of and cared so little for those who 
are not cliqued or classed. We have not yet 
struggled up to the appreciation of the great 
fact of mankind. We think and write our his¬ 
tories in the diminished terms of little races and 
nations. We await the human fact. We seek 
the larger tie than race and nation. Surely, of 
all the times the world has ever known this is 
the time to get into the wearied hearts of man¬ 
kind the claims of the common Shepherd. I 
heard a passionately earnest man from India 
talking to a large company of men on the prob¬ 
lems of his country. He said without any 
hesitancy at all, that if we westerners would 
not insist upon making Jesus Christ in emphasis 
on the lines of our Western interpretation, but 
would, rather, allow him to come among the 
people of India clad in those orientalisms they 
know so well, and which he wears so con¬ 
vincingly, he would sweep India as a great fire 
sweeps across a dried prairie. Jesus Christ does 
fit humanity. He fits mankind in fulfillment 
everywhere. He is the one type at home with 
man. Other great types of men we have had, 
but they have been tethered to their own people. 
Call the roll of all the great ones of history, and 
you call the stories of nations. There has never 
arisen among men but one figure that was uni¬ 
versal in its type. Jesus Christ is the one Shep¬ 
herd. God has set him as the mighty bond amid 


64 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


civilization, and across all the centuries, as the 
one great common bond of man. We have been 
confused by superficial proposals dealing with 
humanitarianisms, and dreaming of universal 
brotherhood founded on social reform. But they 
have invariably proven to be of short life because 
they had no depth of root. Their energy has 
failed, or spent itself in mad revolt. By oft 
costly experiments we have found that the coarse 
selfishness and materialism of the human heart 
win an easy triumph over every form of mere 
visionary altruism, and the hope of the world 
must rest in a power that can make anew the 
human heart and life. Social barriers, proud 
feelings of caste, family feuds, personal en¬ 
mities, national antipathies, all must utterly dis¬ 
solve and disappear in the overwhelming pres¬ 
ence of the one great common Shepherd. 

It was mine to be among the hard-pressed 
ranks of the allied armies in that oppressive 
period just before the final tide was turned to¬ 
ward victory. Death was rampant. There was 
no form of terror that seemed too bad to expect. 
Heroism that waded deep in indescribable suf¬ 
fering, yet uncomplaining, was everywhere. 
There was a desperation that held on in the 
gloom, and looked straight into the dark ahead, 
and doggedly waited. The story of the White 
Companion at the Mons, wrought from suffering, 
on a background of terrible warfare, came back 


THE CHURCH’S UNITY 


65 


as a story of interest from the field to those at 
home, who waited in straining suspense for 
every allowed word of news that could filter 
through. A wonderful picture was painted by 
Hillyard Swinstead called “The White Com¬ 
panion,” and prompted doubtless by the story 
from the Mons. The picture went everywhere 
among the troops, and in the lonely waiting 
homes that steeled themselves to endure what¬ 
ever they might be called upon to endure. I saw 
it in store windows, in cottage windows, in 
soldiers’ tents, in soldiers’ pocket treasures, in 
papers, in magazines. It was a picture that 
portrayed the hope of a great need. Two soldiers 
were staggering back from the lines, across a fire- 
swept field. One was wounded sore, his head 
bandaged, yet drenched with his life red, his 
uniform shot to tatters. He leaned heavily on 
the strong encircling arm of a noble Red Cross 
man. Just beside them, a figure clad in a radi¬ 
ance that shed its beams upon the faces of the 
two struggling men and lightened the path 
ahead, w T as the form of the Son of man. There 
was no strange superstition in it. It was an 
effort of a painter to fasten to canvas what the 
whole world was longing to realize in its dark¬ 
ened life. Out of its sorrow and sickness and 
death the world was looking for the leadership of 
its divine deliverer; the Christ, Son of God, 
Saviour of man, Shepherd and Bishop of our 


66 THE EXPECTED CHURCH 

souls—lie who one great eternally glad day will 
lead this whole troubled, distraught world of 
ours out of all its warrings and distresses and 
divisions into the full realization of its unity, 
and enable us to live in the security of the truth 
that there is one flock and one Shepherd. 


IV 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 

“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but 
he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes 
I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the 
Holy Ghost and with fire.”—Matthew 3. 11. 

In all the attendant incidents that cluster 
around the meeting of Jesus and John Baptist 
there are fine meanings in religion. The old 
order was changing. It was changing in the 
sense of completion. The flower of Judaism 
was being pushed off by the coming of the fruit. 
John Baptist was the vital connection of all 
that which had led up through sometimes wear¬ 
ied years to Jesus Christ. Jesus was the com¬ 
pleted purpose which had reposed in all the 
ceremonies of old. Every incident of this rug¬ 
ged witness of the wilderness, who gathered 
about him an attentive multitude of earnest 
listeners as he told of the coming of the Mes¬ 
siah, carried far more than the incident. Words 
were laden with more than words. Deeds were 
heavy with meaning. John spoke better than he 
knew. 

There have been those who have kept nar¬ 
rowed interpretation upon the passage I have 
67 


68 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


selected for a text, seeking to find in it by intri¬ 
cate interpretation somewhat of the instruc¬ 
tions essential in the mode by which baptism is 
to be administered. That is the very least of my 
interest here. Baptism is not a dynamic of our 
religion. Christianity has been much misrepre¬ 
sented by having its lesser elements made the 
real motives of it. Many troubles in the con¬ 
quest of the world for Christ have arisen from 
the fact that emphasis has been placed on mere 
incidents. I was on a train the other day when 
we had a wonderful race with another train run¬ 
ning on a track that for several miles paralleled 
ours. We outran them. I helped all I could. I 
almost pushed the car-seat in front of me loose 
from the floor. We beat them. It was not be¬ 
cause our train was painted black, and theirs 
red. That was, however, a matter of choice. 
Some like black cars and some like red cars. 
But that is not what makes fast trains, though 
they both be fast colors. The thing that won 
that race was found in the big engine ahead, the 
pressure of steam on those pistons. Baptism 
is not a dynamic of religion. It is a symbol. 
You will not get far in the evangelization of the 
world with an emphasis on symbolism. The 
actual fact symbolized is what we are concerned 
about. He who studies John and Jesus merely 
to find out about baptism is like unto a man who 
became so interested in the art of a sign-painter 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


69 


that he saw only the art and forgot to read the 
sign. John Baptist has actually made his own 
part so awkward and crude that people could 
not fail to be impressed by the fact he sought to 
publish by being fascinated with how he did it. 
That is the supreme art of the advertiser, and 
John was the great advertiser, announcer, fore¬ 
runner of Jesus Christ. He never obscured his 
message with his method. John never got in 
front of Jesus. He set expectation on tiptoe 
everywhere he went. He was subjected to the 
most severe test that can be put to a personality 
of power, the test of pushing off personal prefer¬ 
ence for the sake of his absorbing task. It is 
not hard to be persuaded that both things can 
be achieved, but such an agreement in purpose 
has been, and will forever be, fatal to each. The 
crowd clamored for John. His position invited 
the temptation. He was tall enough to catch the 
testing winds. Small danger of a shrub being 
broken down or uprooted by the storm. The tall 
pine fights the gale. The ground-pine is scarce 
fanned by a storm. “The truest test of all great¬ 
ness, and especially of moral greatness, is often 
found in its refusal to be overrated.” It does 
not require the consciousness of greatness to be 
aware of the genuine meaning of that fact to 
life. There come times to all of us when we at 
least feel the temptation not to concern ourselves 
with impressions that overstate our characters. 


TO 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


We stablish ourselves in the conduct of our self- 
control thus, by saying that we are not account¬ 
able for their ignorance. It is easy to see things 
we have done overestimated. When folks mis¬ 
represent what we do or say in a manner that 
reflects upon our character, we are not slow to 
correct it. But w^hen they overestimate some 
small thing we have done, and magnify it out of 
all proportion in compliment, it is not hard to 
suppress our surprise and keep perfect control 
of our feelings. The intense, concentrate and 
almost fanatical enthusiasm of vast crowds of 
people was centered on John Baptist. His pas¬ 
sionate preaching had captured them. The repu¬ 
tation he had made was always ahead of him to 
compel response to whatever he declared to his 
audiences. Luke has recorded it in his Gospel 
thus, “The people were in expectation, and all 
men mused in their hearts of John, whether he 
were Christ, or not.” What tense preparation 
such popular expectation as that must have 
made for the preacher! It winged every word 
he uttered. It was gathered fuel, into which a 
spark would start a serious situation. There 
was temptation to risk a spark. Had John 
merely maintained silence, he would have been 
worshiped. Surely, there can be little sin in 
being quiet! These crowding people are all for 
you now, John! Such were gentle and easy sug¬ 
gestions that carried the minimum of blame. A 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


71 


band of devoted disciples surrounded him. They 
were jealous and angry, when they saw or sus¬ 
pected signs of the dimming of his glory because 
of the rising glory of any other. Into such a 
condition John’s supreme strength of character 
shone. Jesus had not been announced, and this 
was the time when his own fame was at its 
height, to say his supreme word. Without a 
tinge of bitterness, but with the true joy of his 
great privilege he said, “He must increase, but 
I must decrease,” and pushing back the insistent 
admiration of his followers he startled all those 
who could not see beyond him and declared, 
“There cometh” one, “whose shoes I am not 
worthy to bear.” You call me great, but I am 
unworthy the lowest slave’s service to my 
Christ! In the Oriental house, the lowest slave 
waited at the door to carefully unloose the 
latches of the dusty sandals of the guests. They 
dared not so much as touch the feet; that duty 
was the work and privilege of the next higher 
slave. Such a menial task was looked upon by 
the audience to which John spoke then, as cap¬ 
able of being done by the very least slave obtain¬ 
able. There stands their hero upon whom they 
had been glad to shower honors, declaring for 
his highest honors, “I am unworthy to the poor¬ 
est honors due Him.” 

With this as an approach, I desire now care¬ 
fully to distinguish the two comparative posi- 


72 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


tions occupied by Jesus and John as elements in 
our religion that remain, each requiring the 
other in explanation. “I, John, baptize you with 
water, but Jesus will baptize you with fire.” The 
twofold power which must be found in the Chris¬ 
tian Church is here. John the worker in water. 
Jesus the worker in fire. Man and God in 
religion. The human and divine ingredients in 
Christianity—the twofold church. 

The Church of Jesus Christ becomes powerful 
and adapted, because it is where God and man 
get in touch and in cooperation form an actual 
partnership of service. There is a powerful 
preachment there, if we can but find the words 
now to get it said right. It is a message in 
church announcement too, that is primarily 
essential to this particular day of ours. There 
are few more difficult things to get said in 
this humanly efficient time, in a manner that 
will get a hearing, than the fact that no profi¬ 
ciency of man can ever build God out. Be¬ 
cause man has pushed back the horizon of his 
efficiency very far to-day, it seems that the sense 
of outside dependence is hard to make con¬ 
vincing. It is a long way to the break-down of 
human strength now; that is, if we can imagine 
just how far a long way would be on an infinite 
scale. Human effort is forever* illustrate in 
Babel’s Tower. The height of the tower matters 
nothing. Absolutely nothing I mean. The same 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


73 


truth would be demonstrate were it ten feet or 
ten thousand feet high. Those ambitious men 
who were trying to build up a way of their own 
to God, were to be taught the great lesson that 
has no nearer a completion on top of the last 
layer of brick they can stack in their highest 
tower, than it has on the first thin brick they laid 
on the sand. Nothing matters how merely high 
man shall climb. He stands by his own effort 
no nearer God tiptoe his greatest built-up ascent 
than he did in the dust of the lowly plain of 
Shinar. The real approaches to God have long 
ago taught us that we do actually draw nearer 
to him when with bowed heads in reverence we 
stand in the evening fields of life touched by the 
bells of Angelus, than when in defiance we clam¬ 
ber up some tower and reach out expectant hand. 
Mankind feeling after God is full of hope as indi¬ 
cative of what that desire will enlist from God. 
But if he shall have in his endeavors results only 
of what he can do, he is hopeless. His arms are 
too short. His vision is too narrow. But, God 
seeking after man; emerging from those shadows 
that to our eyes have inclosed him; placing him¬ 
self in touch of the feeling human desire—that 
is the hope of our salvation. 

The ministry of the two elements water and 
fire, made use of in the figure John chose, are 
the mightiest and most resistless of all the forces 
we know here. Either commands respect. Both 


74 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


have played mighty and essential parts in the 
very making of our world. Neptunists and 
Vulcanists, among geologists, have with care 
marked out the ministry of fire and water in the 
making of this globe. By both has the wilder¬ 
ness of the earth been molded. Without water 
we cannot live. Oh the joy and refreshing glad¬ 
ness of the fresh watered country! Those who 
have lived where drought has blown its hot, 
withering breath across the dried fields know 
the delight of the springing fresh green fields. 
I have seen the dried, parched earth; the great 
cracks that opened in the ground; the dead yel¬ 
lowed grass that rustled in the hot breeze; 
waterless fields; how wretched the very term 
sounds! So men go far to the mountains and 
bend the streams to suit their wishes and bring 
the refreshing waters out on the waiting fields. 
I remember so well the lovely green evidence that 
clusters up about the spring of Elisha, at old 
Jericho. It is a large spring and the gardeners 
have crowded up with their gardens and planted 
them to green success just as far out into the 
dried plains of the Jordan valley as the water 
will run. But the dead edge of the waterless 
land lies not far off from the refreshing mouth 
of the spring which does its best. Water is the 
more natural element in our understanding, and 
John used it first. We learned our first step in 
living by the use of water. Fire we felt our 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


75 


more cautious way toward. This scientific day 
of ours has found more and increasingly more 
uses for it, as we have discovered how to direct 
it, how to increase its burning, how to increase 
its heat. The action of fire is inner. We have 
found out how to use blowpipes and furnaces and 
forges and retorts. We have found out what 
fire is good for. Let us seek now for the religious 
significance of this word of John, the worker in 
water, pointing to Jesus, the worker in fire. 

First John is the declaration of the human 
part of our religion. I know I am dealing now 
with a distinction that may be easily misunder¬ 
stood. We must not confuse John’s service. We 
must not underrate either John or Jesus. Jesus 
himself, the operator of that higher and diviner 
element in our religion, not only submitted to 
but insisted upon the baptism of John. 

Immediately after the incident of our text 
the supernatural and the natural joined hands to 
march in united campaign to the sure conquest 
of the world. John’s baptism meant, get your 
bodies clean, make your lives better and purer; 
repent! This is the gospel of repentance. That 
is the primary principle in human progress in 
righteousness. The fundamental requirement 
upon the human soul is self-cleansing in prepara¬ 
tion of God-cleansing. That is fundamental 
religion. We cannot shift upon God the respon¬ 
sibility of our salvation. “Let the wicked for- 


76 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


sake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, 
and he will have mercy upon him; and unto our 
God, for he will abundantly pardon.” The pro¬ 
visions of the gospel hang upon human initiative. 
John Baptist stands for that. He was more 
than a preacher. He was, rather, an event. It 
was in itself, to be sure, a very great honor, 
and a distinguishment to remain forever down 
the story of men, however long it might run, 
that he was the forerunner of our Lord. But 
just as Jesus Christ was to come to mean far 
more than did the candidate he was that day 
for baptism, just as that Lamb of God, so pointed 
out by John, went on from there to his great 
world-altar on Calvary for the redemption of 
sinners, just so was the meaning of John’s mes¬ 
sage more than he said then. In that strange 
wilderness we all have found out, which exists 
in every life, it becomes necessary that this same 
spirit shall again appear and make ready there 
the coming of the Lord. Jesus Christ, and all 
his power and presence, will not come into the 
wilderness of your life and mine, merely to 
blaze his way in reconnoiter. He is not around 
exploring the human soul. Whenever we shall 
be participant of the measureless blessing of the 
coming of our Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, we will 
have had to make ready that coming by most 
careful preparation. John’s business is funda- 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


77 


mental. Christianity with all its attendant 
blessings is not mere reception. Impotence on 
your part is not an element in the gospel. A 
broken and empty vessel is not a fair offering 
for us to bring to our Lord. There is a human 
task in religion. You can’t even grow without 
effort. The process of growth is work. There 
must be a tearing down in order that there shall 
be a more efficient building up enjoyed. Though 
unconscious to you every particle of your body 
must pass through violent action, even unto the 
death of itself, before growth can be attained. 
There is an essential John-side in the matter of 
Christ coming to your life. You must go into 
the wilderness of your own soul. You alone 
know the way there. Make there a straight way 
for the coming of your Redeemer. 

That is a fundamental principle that must 
precede Christ’s coming to mankind. The 
church has John’s work now to do. The mantle 
of the Baptist has now fallen upon Christ’s 
church. Give us to-day a church in the world, in 
which the membership consistently stands for 
the clean life implied in John’s baptism, and the 
progress of Jesus Christ straight into the 
world’s life will be an unhindered march. I 
will dare, therefore, now put the searching ques¬ 
tion to you which all this implies and really 
compels; I will dare put it to you because I have 
first tried to put it straight and honestly to my 


78 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


own heart. Not that in any manner I would 
seem to come now to make claim to qualify be¬ 
fore such a serious question as this is, but, rather, 
that God w T ill bear me witness, I have sought 
earnestly that I might be, even with my poverty 
of life and service, of some help in the great task 
of the Church of Christ on earth now. I make 
bold, therefore, to ask, how much, oh, how much, 
if any, has my life cleared the way about my 
community for the coming to it of my Lord and 
Saviour? Let none dodge the issue. We can¬ 
not shift the blame. How many lives have you 
ever cleared a path before, along which Jesus 
Christ might come? Has there ever been heard 
in the wilderness surrounding any heart any¬ 
where the true cry of your earnest life, “Make 
way for the Lord”? I saw a meeting strangely 
moved one night, and I heard a word from a well- 
known man among us as we were planning some 
evangelistic endeavor, that surprised and yet 
sent searching questions into all our hearts, as 
he rose and frankly declared that though he 
had been a Christian from boyhood, and though 
he had always been endeavoring to do his pre¬ 
scribed work in the church, and was then as he 
had been for many years an official member in 
the church, he yet could not say that he knew 
of the case of one human soul to whom he had 
been the direct means of acquaintanceship with 
Jesus Christ That frank and significant con- 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


79 


fession set a flame to that meeting, and we found 
ourselves very quickly dealing with genuine 
evangelistic fundamentals. That is the human 
essential in the church. It cannot be left out. 
It stands in demand before every one of us. 
There is no excuse to be found in personal ob¬ 
scurity. You will remember here and there all 
down the eloquent story of the church how some 
John Baptist or John of Barneveldt or John 
Wesley or John Callahan or John You, actually 
did reach through the very dull day in which 
they lived and touched to real result this vital 
fact. The human side of the twofold Church of 
Christ. 

Second. Thus far we have come in considera¬ 
tion of the preliminary element of our religion, 
in order thus to be able more quickly to declare 
what the real dynamic of it is. The human part 
is preliminary. It cannot be more. Men lose 
when they hold only that. You cannot light 
your path at night with a picture of a torch, no 
matter with how much genius it shall have been 
painted. I saw a wonderful picture once of a 
beautiful sun-flooded field. It was a true mas¬ 
terpiece—but we had to turn on the lights to 
see it. There was not even the softest glow 
about it. Even so this, though it be essential, 
human side of our religion is so small that John 
makes it unworthy to even loosen the shoe- 
latchets of the divine element. It is absolutely 


80 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


important that I have a clean earth-life. God 
help us every one at that task. But that is 
strong because of what it makes possible to 
bring into our lives, and through us into the 
world’s life. Folks can be good and not Chris¬ 
tians—merely good. You cannot be Christians 
and not good, however. Just as soon as the 
wires become grounded we lose the whole charge. 
It is very important that the wires for electricity 
shall be properly hung and insulated. But they 
can be hung perfectly from the standpoint of 
workmanship and still leave us sitting in the 
darkness. It is possible to have an absolutely 
perfect exhibition of wiring, simply as wiring. 
Electricity on those wires is another matter. It 
is possible to have a good, moral, clean life, and 
still be only that. But that is exactly what the 
tragedy of a merely good life is. A good life 
ought to be a religious life. No man would ever 
be so dull of perception as to pass along our 
wire-interlaced streets and think we had merely 
hung wires there just for the purpose of hanging 
wires on posts. Of course there is some reason 
for these wires, and an absolute stranger to our 
civilization would ask why the wires were there. 
We even forget the wires along which the light 
has come, or over which our words have gone 
leaping with unthinkable speed, unless the light 
fails, or our phone gets no response. Then we 
say, “What is the trouble with our connection?” 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


81 


The genius of perfect equipment is that you for¬ 
get it in the service it renders. When you are 
making ready for the coming of the power, then 
the thought is on the equipment. With familiar 
figure thus I have been endeavoring to put this 
fact of our text before you. The church to the 
world is in this. When we are perfectly ad¬ 
justed the world has long since learned the 
religious power we carry. Then no one asks 
about us, for our righteousness is evident in 
attained results, and in those results our right¬ 
eousness will remain without notice. But when 
the power doesn’t come, and when there is no 
evidence of the divine in our work, no matter 
how splendidly we polish up the equipment, men 
ask and ask eagerly, “What’s the matter with 
the church?” Then have we made it of none effect. 
When the spiritual life flashes out, we wonder 
what is wrong with the earth life. If an individ¬ 
ual seems brilliant, and is yet devoid of spiritual 
influence, if a church seems strenuous, and en¬ 
thusiastic in all its work, and yet remains with¬ 
out results in the salvation of souls, and finds 
itself standing in the community a mere house 
of empty services, we at once ask, “What is the 
matter with the earth-life?” The consciousness 
of a fault somewhere in the human equipment is 
what we realize when the purpose of the church 
is not accomplished. John calls the power that 
is to attend this rightly arranged human prepa- 


82 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


ration, the baptism of fire. Think of his figure. 
What agency has ever been found that carries 
such powerful purifying ability as the agency of 
fire? You can wash the surface with water, but 
you will not thereby cleanse the real substance. 
Beyond John Baptist’s side of Christianity is 
the work of the Christ side of it. The miner 
brings in from his washing-pans clean, yellow 
gold. It is beautiful and valuable. But there 
clings to it, and down in it, a dross which can 
only be removed by fire. I have gazed into the 
heated furnace. Why burn the gold so fiercely? 
They keep a careful registration of the heat 
there. They told me it had to be done in order 
to burn away all the impurities. I remember so 
well with w T hat wonder as a college boy I watched 
the test of the borax bead in our class in blow¬ 
pipe analysis. We would burn a bit of borax 
on a platinum wire at the point of a blowpipe 
flame until it was absolutely clear. Then we 
could with its purity, detect the substance of 
anything it touched by the color it would pro¬ 
duce in that pure bead. John says Jesus’ bap¬ 
tism of fire is the symbol of purity for power. 
Baptism of water, human part, is introductory 
to the real work of God in us symbolized by fire. 
Moral life is precious. There cannot be placed 
upon it too high a measure of importance. Would 
God we were all better. God knows my own 
personal prayer. But moral life alone is not 


THE TWOFOLD CHURCH 


83 


sufficient. The real power of religion is not in 
it. If we have mere morals, what have we more 
than others? We have no monopoly on morals. 
The heathen may be good. I have frequently 
had folks say in a confidence that they had 
justified themselves completely, “I am as good 
as church folks.” It may all be true. But even 
perfect wiring may leave your house in darkness. 
There is no brilliance in wires. It has been 
true, too, that some wiring not nearly so good as 
yours has still brought light and cheer into the 
house. The ministration of John Baptist is not 
enough. He is unworthy—he so testifies. We 
must have your very best life. We do not argue 
that. But the only thing that will purify the 
life of the church and put into it the power it 
must have to get its work done is the baptism of 
fire. There is a very familiar story, become 
familiar because it is one of the best ones out of 
mythology, which tells how Epimetheus sent his 
brother to steal for him some of the fire of the 
gods. So Prometheus, aided by Minerva, 
climbed the great arch of the heavens and 
kindled his torch at the flaming chariot wheels 
of the sun, and brought the sacred fire back to 
Epimetheus, proud and confident of its great 
value. We are not in need now of any such 
mythological boldness. Jesus Christ has come 
this way. We need not wear ourselves to weari¬ 
ness in the impossible climb to God. Yet this 


84 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


has largely been the hard religious endeavor of 
the past. We will scale the heavens and light 
our torches at God’s altar. Listen, O ambitious 
day of ours! You need salvation from yourself. 
You look at science as Prometheus, and with his 
million-league boots you send him out on the 
measureless trail of the heavens whose horizons 
you have pushed back to a farther flung appre¬ 
ciation of infinitude than any other day has ever 
had, and ask him now to bring again to you the 
fresh lighted torch from heaven’s highest altar. 
The stories he brings back from his journeys 
to-day make the stories of mythology sound 
stale and tame, for we have actually felt out 
farther and brought in reports from distances 
whose terms were not even thinkable yesterday. 
But this modern Prometheus does not succeed, 
the reason being that the real malady of the 
race, productive of ignorance and care and pain, 
is unrighteousness and not what this new Prome¬ 
theus would have us think. We await, and 
simply must have God. It is less distance for 
God to come to us than for us to go to him. This 
is the message of the Christian Church. This is 
the ministry of Jesus Christ. Let us get hon¬ 
estly to the world, and with clean life let us help 
make straight the path for the coming in 
quickly of the power of God in Christ, that will 
burn up the dross, and purify and make usable 
all the gold of the age in which we live. May 


THE TWOFOLD CHUKCH 


85 


the clear contrast of these two elements of our 
religion stand forth in our lives, and may this 
simple call here made be used of the Spirit to 
the genuine building of our faith. God needs 
you, and you need God, in the big effort to make 
this whole world better and lead it up to full 
salvation. 


V 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 

“As much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos¬ 
pel.”—Romans 1. 15. 

The message of the Church of Jesus Christ to 
the age is the ever-interesting question before 
the churchman who looks upon the church as 
the institution of God raised up to set right a 
world gone wrong. The gospel remains the 
same, but the ever-changing age demands an 
ever-changing method in order to adapt that 
gospel to its task. The work of the church has 
ever been troubled by devotees who could not 
distinguish between matter and method. The 
ever-essential fact of the gospel of our Lord 
Christ has the right of universal adaptation of 
age and people. 

As a Christian man I must seek honestly and 
diligently to know my age and to understand it. 
I must know its conditions without a prejudice 
that would invalidate my conclusions. I must 
know its motives, its ambitions and its abilities, 
I must discern its loves and its hates, the prob¬ 
lems that distress it, the hopes that lift it. I 
must detect carefully the sound of its grinding 
86 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 


87 


wheels, the echoes of its delirious pleasures, the 
sighs and sobs of its sorrows. 

There may yet be some quiet, secluded places 
on earth, from whence men and women can come 
up to God in judgment and submit a record of 
mere passive goodness in a confidence that it is 
enough. I do not just now, however, know where 
those places are located. There may have been 
ages in our world’s much-troubled story from 
which men and women could go home to God in 
assurance that they had shut themselves merely 
away from human contact and thus found salva¬ 
tion, though I have never yet been able to bring 
myself to believe I have read into the human 
story when such thing was justifiably Christian. 
But I would dread to attempt to walk up to a 
judgment set against this great day in which we 
find ourselves charged with living, and bring as 
my defense, and all the appeal for salvation I 
could muster, the negative declaration that I 
had never hurt anybody, or at least no one ever 
knew I had done so. I stood beside a judge the 
other day as he was passing sentence upon a 
man who had been convicted of a very serious 
crime, and the crushed lives in glaring evidence 
of his guilt were beside him before the judge. I 
do not know why he dared speak such axiomatic 
folly as he did, but from his trembling lips when 
given leave to speak before sentence was passed, 
the convicted man said, “If I had only remained 


88 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


out of the country you would not have caught 
me.” I never heard such words from a judge’s lips 
as leaped out in answer to that coward’s plea. 
Judgment flamed up in response to so weak an 
idea as avoidance, as a matter for even con¬ 
sideration when positive matters were at stake. 
The Christian will find no security in avoidance 
of any responsibility. The Christian Church 
can never conduct a program of avoidance. It 
was established with a mission, which mission 
meant perpetual vital contact with every human 
need. In the crisis of this day, when social mat¬ 
ters are the burden of the soap-box orator’s ad¬ 
dress and the appeal of every plain man’s 
thinking, there surely must be recognized the 
vital part to be rendered by the message of 
Jesus’ gospel, if it be what we who profess our¬ 
selves to be Christians believe it to be. The 
passion of the church should be expended in 
delivering that message. I fear me we have been 
guilty of late of putting our most enthusiastic 
endeavor on mechanics rather than message. 

The busy life of our busy world that is in some¬ 
what blind endeavor seeking now to build 
back its broken place in industry, is filling our 
ears with confused noises. Men everywhere are 
sensing the monopolizing tendency of that life 
which deals with things. The atmosphere about 
us blows from a whole world too—a needy world, 
a world with eager hands outstretched, a world 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 


89 


realizing it must wait at our factory doors. All 
this means more to us as Christians than we 
realize at first thought. The church must stand 
amid it all. It must stand there for something; 
something distinct and worthy, something great 
enough and practical enough to be able to ask 
attention for; something we can feel justified 
in demanding enthusiasm for, even to the full 
measure of sacrifice. You men, with the sweat 
of labor on your faces, and the soil of hard work 
on your hands, hear ye! We have a word for 
you. You men who guide our ships and plan 
our commerce, stop your ships and listen! You 
men who are eagerly engaged in bringing the 
golden harvests from the fruitful bosoms of our 
bountiful fields to the hunger-driven crowds of 
our city streets, we have a word for you: “As 
much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos¬ 
pel!” I am saying that unless the church has 
an absolute profound faith in that message 
she will not dare run out before such a busy, 
hard-pressed world as our world is now, and 
ask for a hearing. We do not dare ask a hearing 
unless we have something to say. We must ex¬ 
pect likewise that when God sent us out to speak 
to such a world as this he did not send us out 
with mere words to string meaningless phrases, 
nor to spend ourselves in mere exercise over mat¬ 
ters that were impotent to change the kind of a 
world we know is not right, into the world such 


90 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


unrighteousness but argues for, because it is un¬ 
righteousness, and that is negative. 

The church is risked with a real revolution¬ 
izing message. A wrong world could not expect 
anything else. That fact likewise makes just 
interest in what the church shall do with its 
trust. When a boy lies on my lawn playing with 
a ball and a few marbles, I am little concerned, 
and concerned as I am, only with his personal 
happiness. But when he begins carelessly bat¬ 
ting a stick of dynamite about, I either change 
the game or move my location. The world has 
come to realize that the message of the gospel of 
Jesus Christ is no mere toy-program for the 
entertainment of a company of people who meet 
together apart from the world just to talk. That 
gospel has been delivered to the church, which 
has been charged to stir it into the life of the 
world, and the world knows it will change that 
life when it is done. That gospel has been sent 
to be delivered in the market, in the counting- 
room, in the shop, on the dock, in the field, at 
the counter, everywhere where men and women 
and children live and work, and to be delivered 
there not merely as though it had a recognized 
right there, but as though it had an irresistible 
mission there. The task of the church is to 
gather up into Jesus Christ not some but all 
human life; and the message which is to make 
that task an accomplished fact is this great gos- 


THE CHUKCH’S MESSAGE 


91 


pel of Jesus. It is to be preached not merely 
from the pulpit, even though that be done with 
all the eloquence of Paul, who gave us the text 
we use now on one of his greatest preaching days, 
but preached likewise by every simple believer 
who lives its precepts into the actual footsteps 
of ordinary life. There was to me a most inter¬ 
esting incident of the living message of our gos¬ 
pel which happened in some unpretentious ser¬ 
vice of some Christians during the Great War. 
A shipload of Hindus came to France. Some 
plain Christian workers had been assigned for 
welfare w T ork among them, with strict orders, 
and with faithful promise of those men, that 
they would not mention the name of Christ nor 
speak of Christianity. Those honest Christians 
went to merely live the life, as honestly as they 
could see it, that Christ would have them live. 
They literally followed his most menial example, 
and washed the feet of men in need, and minis¬ 
tered to those w r arriors, Mohammedans and 
Buddhists, in a living though wordless message. 
The Hindu soldiers w^rote home w T hen they ar¬ 
rived in France: “When we left Calcutta there 
w^ere no Mohammedans w T ho cared for our souls; 
there were no Buddhists who looked after us. 
These Christians have been brothers to us. 
There is nothing they have not done for us. They 
have been like servants. Put our sons and 
daughters in the missionary schools; we want to 


92 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


know what this Christian religion is.” That is 
what I call delivering the gospel message effec¬ 
tually. Woe be to any life that dares the name 
Christian that shall dare allow such fertile days 
as these to pass without improvement. 

Jesus Christ is always close to life. He came 
in order to get God close to man. He is never 
confused, he is never at a loss to meet any human 
situation. There is no complicating condition to 
wilich he cannot adjust himself; no hindering 
difficulty, no crushing sorrow, no bewilder¬ 
ing defeat, no head-turning victory. Nothing 
man knows, or can do, will confuse this Christ 
of God. He is the consummate expression 
of God toward man, after the long ages of 
preparation through the needs and calls of 
humanity. I get the testimony of those typi¬ 
cal ones all down the long tedious way when 
men stumbled onward with expectant eyes, and 
waiting the full revelation were yet confident of 
the fact. Abraham, plodding an oft wearied 
way, but never faltering in his faith, cried out 
when he couldn't see, but could still trust, “The 
Lord sees our need and will provide.” Moses, 
standing hilltop in a strange, hostile land, hold¬ 
ing up his hands in persistent confidence when 
all his natural eyes could see was the oncoming 
hosts of his enemies, still cried out, “Jehovah is 
my banner.” Gideon, temporarily timid, but at 
last recovering himself and running in his glad, 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 


93 


strange triumph, built an altar and declared, 
“Tlie Lord is Peace.” Jeremiah, from his gloomy 
grotto, with the sad ashes of the nation sprin¬ 
kled on his head, and the crash of his falling 
land in his ears as Babylon trampled it down, 
still looked out of his darkness to see and said, 
“Jehovah our Righteousness.” Ezekiel, whose 
eyes unhindered looked steadily to wonderful 
visions ever beyond every settling gloom, and 
beheld the establishment of the faith, declared, 
“The Lord is there.” I need not list more of 
those witnesses down the great story of the Old 
Testament. The New Testament brings all these 
persistent testimonies and expectations to a 
universal answer, and Jesus Christ, friend and 
Saviour of every man, stands' forth. Hence¬ 
forth he is to be the demonstration, eloquent and 
conclusive, of God with us, Emmanuel, and to 
show us effectually that in everything we have 
him beside us. He is abreast every question. He 
is actually a part of every calling need. Take 
this one manifest appeal. We are in social 
trouble—this industrial-ridden day; day of roar¬ 
ing forges, pounding sledges, hissing engines, 
straining derricks, grinding wheels; questions of 
labor and capital, poverty, family integrity, 
city governments, industrial competition. This 
trouble-crowded day is sure things are out of 
harmony. There is a haunting sense of inequal¬ 
ity. There is a consciousness of contradiction 


94 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


between economic progress and spiritual ideals. 
The disturbance is radical. It is not a matter 
merely held in the analytical thought-processes 
of the scholar. It is found likewise in the more 
instinctive brain of the man who, compelled to 
work with his hands for a living, has nevertheless 
by the very process compulsive been putting thus 
some fundamental social ideas in his mind. It 
is at the questioning heart of the wearied woman 
who watches out long nights of trouble and care, 
and thinks in her darkness toward some light 
somewhere. Mankind is studying the problem 
of life with all its unequal burdens. There has 
arisen among us, too, the belief (no matter just 
now how logical its arrival may or may not be, 
the fact of its being here is the fact we must 
recognize) that this big, hard-hitting, rich, 
resourceful, army-drafting, democracy-yearning 
age is the age to settle many of these problems. 
To this I must be bold to declare my faith as a 
churchman in the solution God gave me to de¬ 
clare. I believe the gospel of Christ is oppor¬ 
tune. Nothing is too hard for this message. “In 
the newest discoveries; in the broadest philan¬ 
thropies; in the ripest and purest politics; in the 
truest social ideals,” men are discovering this 
Christian message. It is a new discovery of the 
old and oft-stated truth that the world has never 
lost him, never outran him, never passed beyond 
his range of influence. He has come on with us 


\ 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 95 

out of all the things we have escaped in the past, 
the full explanation of those escapes. He is the 
check upon all wrong and the inspiration upon 
every good. 

O that the church knew better how to declare 
such a message! 

Who are you? “I am a poor woman, who has 
lost the way and gone all wrong.” Get to Christ, 
woman. He knows all about you. He had a 
case the like of w T hich yours could never ap¬ 
proach. “Thy sins which are many are all for¬ 
given. Go and sin no more,” said he then, and, 
saying that, he was talking to every such case 
forever. 

Who are you? “I sir, am a thief, and con¬ 
demned in my own heart, as well as at the bar of 
justice.” Say, “Lord, remember me”; and 
though the affairs of eternity are on his divine 
soul, he will hear you, for the only thing he 
stopped dying on the cross for that great day, 
was to answer a thief and save him. 

Who are you? “Just a poor little unknown 
child.” Come to this Christ, Make your way 
through those big folks about you there, and 
lift your little hand, and he will see you, and 
stooping down he will say to you what he said 
once to childhood forever, “Of such is the king¬ 
dom of heaven.” 

Who are you? “I am a workingman, and a 
tired, worn soul. I am wearied of work and 


96 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


strife. I am sick of the turmoil as well as worn 
at my task.” Well, there never was a more 
beautiful and tender word breathed into the 
great labor problem than the word personal of 
Jesus, backed up by all heaven’s ability and the 
eternal heart of God, “Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest.” 

Who are you? “Oh, I am a rich man, troubled 
at the problems my riches heap upon me. When 
life seems in reach of the things I had fancied the 
fairest of all things to possess, I find no pleasure 
in possessing them. Yet I have run my soul tired 
and broken in pursuit of all this I now possess 
in dissatisfaction.” Well, come to Jesus Christ. 
He met one day just such a fine-privileged rich 
man. He would have set that man a power in 
the world’s story forever, had he but heeded 
him that day. As it was he chose to be merely 
rich, and we have forgotten his name. It isn’t 
riches; it is life. 

Who are you? Your face is sad! “Oh, I am a 
mother just staggering home through the sorrow 
of the death of my beloved first-born. The sun 
seems set forever. It is pitch dark. The music 
of life is hushed. The fragrance of living has 
departed. The joy of the world is stilled.” Well, 
mother, you had better make your way to Christ 
soon as you can. He has been comforting such 
as you across the years. He can reach through 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 


97 


sorrow. He even carried his conquest of death 
personally into the grave and through it. He 
was dead, and is now alive forevermore. He has 
the words of eternal life. He has soothed more 
broken hearts, started a new song in more mute 
hearts of mourning, brought more actual com¬ 
fort to human distress, lifted more sincere hope 
over the graves of this world’s dead, than all 
other forces this world knows, combined. 

I must not multiply cases. I have noted what 
I have, illustrative merely of the fact that Paul 
knew what he was backed with when he spoke 
his confidence of this great gospel. He was a 
world-figure for heroics. Rome held the world. 
Righteousness seemed to have no voice. Lust 
ruined and ravaged all that was pure. The 
ties of the family were scouted. The few ground 
down the many. Cruelty was a boast. Religion 
was a mockery. No one dared speak. One day 
a strange figure came trudging wearily along 
the Appian way. It was a way marked by the 
chariot wheels of victors and the dragging 
chains of the vanquished. A little, emaciated, 
bent, prison-bleached captive in chains would 
stir slight notice there. I went out once to walk 
along the same road just to gather courage for 
my own life. I carefully brushed off some of 
the old stones that still lie in the pavement and 
wondered if he walked just there. But he was 
not noticed. Aside from a few friends who 


98 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


greeted him at the Three Taverns he came in 
unheralded. No one knew it was one of the 
world’s great day. No one knew the little pro¬ 
cession meant more to the whole world than all 
the triumphal parades they had shouted along 
there. The announcement of the message that 
was to free the slaves, kill the riotous self-indul¬ 
gence and change the whole story of that 
wicked city was making ready that day. Never 
such audacity and confidence—the strongest 
against the weakest. The tired dust-covered 
prisoner came dragging his mocking chains up 
to the gates, and looking full into the face of its 
magnificent misery and sin cried out, “I am now 
ready to preach the gospel to Rome.” That 
world-crisis has two contributive reasons for the 
boldness of the messenger, which I want to em¬ 
phasize as found in the verse following our text, 
which make sure our program as Christ’s church, 
in the conquest of the world. 

First. An efficient message, “The power of 
God unto salvation.” It is power. That insures 
courage. A man loses heart when assigned to a 
task he cannot perform. The reason men get 
discouraged is that they doubt their resources. 
Paul was not afraid he had a greater task than 
power with which to meet it. He was always 
sure of God. That is the secret of confidence. 
Little matters it what may come, if we keep 
clear in our conviction that we have God. Just 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 


99 


what difficulty may mean when measured beside 
omnipotence we have no way to determine. But 
we may always rest sure we have God, and 
trouble ourselves the least as to what difficulty 
may be ahead. It steadies our courage to really 
settle ourselves in belief. Nothing needs to be 
driven into the soul of the church’s life to-day 
more than confidence in God. The world needs 
to be made to feel the shock of the presence upon 
it of a church actually endowed with God. We 
have a strong age to talk to. Someone has 
diagnosed our day as troubled over the fact that 
intellectual arrogance and groveling discontent 
have mated, and brought forth strange creatures 
of doubt and disbelief. The situation challenges 
every strength we possess. Has the Christian 
Church the power, or are we gone out to too big 
a task? Is it once more a story of Babel, only 
written in modern terms? Have we undertaken 
an impossible tower? I know a bit of the day’s 
eager offerings. I know somewhat of the un¬ 
easiness attendant upon our economic evolution. 
I know the clamor of the trades. I know the 
strain of society and how much of the real 
strength of the world is being misspent there. 
I would arise amid it all and declare my unquali¬ 
fied faith in the gospel of the Son of God as the 
solution divinely devised. 

In all these fierce social tangles, whose in¬ 
tricacies seem ever to increase as men are being 


100 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


huddled together in classes, cleaving along lines 
that are not just lines of cleavage among us; in 
this industrial day’s expression of competitive 
commercialism, where the weak are actually 
being crowded to the wall simply because they 
are weak, and not because they have not a fair 
right to live; in our racial jealousies, that have 
caused men to court racial superiority as the 
criterion of world progress; in our national 
antipathies that have unbalanced the whole 
world’s peace and threaten now to destroy our 
whole civilization; in every complication this 
much-troubled day can produce, I would make 
bold to declare my confidence in this gospel. 
There is nothing too hard for God’s church to 
do, if it is God’s church. We are set at a world 
task, and the creator of the commission to which 
we are sent is behind our faithful espousal of it, 
and we need not turn back from its exactions. 
It is related of that great faithful missionary 
Doctor Gordon that once while he was making 
an ocean voyage to visit some mission outposts, 
the ship on which he rode was becalmed. They 
lay for many hours near the shores of some 
cannibal islands. The captain, in desperation, 
finally went with evident apology for such a 
suggestion, and not without demonstrated doubt 
in his suggestion, and asked the preacher if he 
would pray for a wind. Gordon was not hesi¬ 
tant in replying, but took the captain by surprise 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 101 

as lie said, conditionally, “I will be glad to pray, 
if yon will hoist the sails.” The captain, fearful 
of what interpretation might be hurled at him 
by his ungodly crew, replied in argumentative 
willingness that he would hoist the sail if Gor¬ 
don would start any sort of a breeze. The man 
of God replied, “No, sir! If you have not faith 
enough to get ready for the wind I will not offer 
one word of petition to God.” The captain said 
it would look silly to raise great canvas sails in 
an absolute calm. The men of the ship could 
not do it without laughing. The cannibals sit¬ 
ting along the shores would laugh. But Gordon 
held to his provision, and said: “No sails, no 
prayer. It is no worse to look silly to men than 
to stand faithless in prayer before God.” The 
desperation increased, however, until the captain 
said he would order up the canvas. As the great 
sails began to be unfurled, Gordon went to his 
room in the hold of the ship and shut the door 
in the darkness to pray. For some time he was 
not disturbed, and opened his soul in earnestness 
to God. There was a strong knock on his door, 
and an inquiry from the captain, “Are you still 
praying, sir?” 

“Yes,” was the missionary’s answer. 

“Well, you had better stop,” came the reply, 
“for we have more wind now than we can 
handle.” 

It is never a question of power within reach 


102 


THE EXPECTED CHUBCH 


of the church. Every failure we ever make must 
he laid some other where than to the lack of 
power. I am ready to preach the gospel, for it 
is power. 

Second. “It is the power of God.” That we 
must make clear. It is the distinguishment of 
the church. We are to do things in a manner 
that will keep that fact ever before the eyes of 
the world. The actual power of the church is 
not such as can be calculated by ordinary tables. 
The only claim we have is the supernatural 
claim. We are not organized and set in the 
world to merely raise up a good standard of 
literature, or to do a commendable work in 
social service that will spend itself in mere 
social service. We do stand for the very best 
there is to be had in the equipment of life, but 
a veritable devil may live in good sanitary quar¬ 
ters, and prosper under the philanthropic efforts 
of mere physical ministry. It is upon the dis¬ 
tinguishing element of religious influence we 
are to practice our work. The music of human 
redemption is the sweetest song that was ever 
sung into the human story. Humanity unhelped 
of God is prostrate and despairing. Hope comes 
with the message of religion. People are not 
only willing, they are eager to go to church if 
they believe their Lord is there to help them. 
Without him they will not stay to hear about 
some mere dream of a better day hoped for and 


THE CHURCH’S MESSAGE 103 

longed for in our need. There is a plain but 
pointed story in one of the addresses of Doctor 
Hitchcock, a preacher of a former day, who had 
a passion that never dimmed for the divine mes¬ 
sage. It is a story of an old Bedouin who was 
lost in a desert, and faced the full liability of 
that perhaps the worst lostness physical the 
world knows. He had been without food till his 
only hope lay in the scant possibility that some 
traveler before him might have thrown away 
the bare morsel that would sustain his life. At 
last with the eager eyes of desperation that be¬ 
held the mirage of a fountain, he did see a 
traveler’s bag. To his demanding hunger it 
simply must contain some bread. A crust! Just 
a dried morsel of bread! Slowly he dragged his 
famished body over the hot sand to the little 
leather pouch, and grabbing it eagerly with his 
last strength poured out on the sun-glistened 
sand a stream of glorious gems. As they lay 
there in the desert deadness, and shone in the 
reflected splendor of the brightest sun, the fam¬ 
ished body of the hungry man fell over upon them 
with the cry of his greatest disappointment, “Oh, 
they are only diamonds! Only diamonds!” I 
would stand amid a world more needy of God 
than any starving desert-bound man was ever in 
need of bread and say, God forbid that such a 
story shall ever be the disappointed accusation 
against the church with its message to our day. 


104 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


That preacher is foolish and untrue to his 
trust, and being a divine trust, therefore a privi¬ 
lege, who fails to stand square to the deliver¬ 
ance of this message. The power of God is our 
endowment. It is all we need, but we need it 
all. We can take it and confidently ask for a 
hearing, knowing we have a word of prior in¬ 
terest. The world may be busy, but it never can 
get too busy, to set this message aside. Human 
workers cannot wear too weary to listen. Hu¬ 
man sorrow cannot strike too deep to listen. 
Human joy cannot run too gladly to hear. We 
can ask audience of the world without apology. 
Our message was framed at the councils of 
heaven and is prior in every condition human 
life can know. It will not lessen meaning any¬ 
where. Material treasures will still abound. 
The iron will be rich in our mines and our fur¬ 
naces fertile in their flaming treasures. But 
something else will men find, and the living voice 
of the message we are to deliver will help them 
to find their souls. A new ideal will spring up 
before an un-ideal age; and a new ambition will 
arise among men through the true life of a 
church living passionately up to the privilege of 
its commission; and a new light will break across 
the world as when the morning has driven the 
night away. “I am ready, as much as in me is, 
to preach the gospel.” 


VI 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


“Thy kingdom come.”—Matthew 6. 10. 

“Thy kingdom come!” It is not yet here. 
There is reason to believe it will some day be 
here. The coming of that day is not a matter 
wholly taken over by our God. When Jesus 
taught us to pray that very significant prayer, 
he knew what it would be certain to mean to a 
world into whose consciousness it had once 
effectually made its way as a real prayer. Every 
prayer that is genuine, tends constantly to shape 
itself into a program for the life of the one who 
prays it. There is liability in a prayer. It can¬ 
not be framed at my lips and then forgotten from 
my life, as though I had discharged myself from 
all obligations to it when I solemnly said 
“Amen.” I want now, therefore, to look stead¬ 
fastly into the responsibility which is entailed 
upon the Christian Church, taught in its estab¬ 
lishment to pray for the coming of the kingdom 
of God, and continuing thus down the centuries 
to pray it, wondering often at the slow-footed 
answer. I want us to look honestly at our duty 
as disclosed in our prayer, rather than at our 
105 


106 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


prayer as an easy method of having done for us 
something that will doubtless cost us most 
dearly. The idea which has disclosed itself to me 
in two distinct interpretations of these very fa¬ 
miliar words, flashed upon my mind one night as 
I sat listening to a burning message from the 
eager soul of a missionary, just home from a won¬ 
derful field of work where he had been laboring 
through hard but hopeful years, seeking to estab¬ 
lish the faith he loved among some benighted 
people. The thought which came to me had 
nothing whatever to do with the address he made 
save as it might be related in extreme applica¬ 
tion. I am full persuaded, however, that in the 
present world-crisis we must catch the full mean¬ 
ing of the fruited consummation of the flower of 
our faith. It is a great thing to really have a 
faith. Unless we have a genuine faith we can¬ 
not go far in life. The meaning of life soon runs 
thin to him who cherishes a shallow faith. But 
a faith that is a real faith demands an acceptance 
that will honor it. It is not fair to faith to allow 
it to merely remain faith. It must become active 
to results. 

The other day I was passing along the street 
in the downtown district of our city in one of 
its most crowded places. I saw an unusual 
crowd of people seemingly attracted by some 
curious sight, and I risked adding one more to 
the congestion to make sure I should see any- 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


107 


thing worth seeing. In the center of the fast¬ 
growing crowd sat a quiet, contented looking 
fellow, a picture of unconcern, seated on the high 
buggy-seat of an old horseless carriage. It cer¬ 
tainly did look like the original. He said it was. 
No one dared dispute him. The policeman for 
traffic had to order the fellow to drive away. He 
was blocking the street. Many folks thought 
they were trying to go somewhere, and there 
were so many folks who seemed satisfied with 
the particular where of that old machine as the 
place they sought, that other destinations could 
not be easily attained. There was not another 
machine along the machine-crowded street that 
stopped traffic. Here at the home of automo¬ 
biles, here where every type of motor-machines 
made make familiar sights along our streets, 
and extreme types merely excite a passing atten¬ 
tion, that hard-looking, unpainted, old, rattling 
machine caught the attention of everybody. The 
drivers of beautiful new cars stopped to look. 
Why? Simply because that crude thing was the 
faith of a man formulated first into an active 
program. It was the vital transportation which 
made possible all this maze of machines we know 
so well to-day. I saw the first mowing-machine 
ever made. It was a hard-looking, weather-beaten 
old piece of work. We to-day could scarce think 
out so crude an old machine as it was. It sat 
close beside the latest model machine the factory 


108 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


could make. The new product was mounted in 
shining brass, varnished like a parlor chair, and 
had every joint mounted on steel balls. But the 
old machine caught all the interest. The spec¬ 
tators circled about it all the time, because it 
was the first concrete expression of the forward- 
looking faith of a man, as he put his faith into an 
embodiment that now has run the w T orld round 
and helped feed the hungry millions of mankind. 

I seek now to find a putting for that great fact 
religiously. It takes some time for great faith 
to dominate a man’s life. You cannot find a 
man easily and quickly transformed around a 
great faith into its actual and logical expression. 
That faith must first crystallize his very soul. 
It takes centuries for a great faith to saturate a 
whole race of mankind. But God is patient, and 
he has mankind as his objective rather than 
some fragmentary race of folks, or some nervous 
generation of people. God abides down the 
years and patiently matures his people into a 
maturity that surely leads toward his program. 
Dim though it yet may be, in the uncertain at¬ 
mosphere that clings round our world in these 
stormy days, I yet believe we can discern signs 
that the great faith that has weathered so many 
centuries, w ith all they have been able to hurl 
against it, is now becoming the dominant pro¬ 
gram of humanity. Many have had to cling to 
their faith, merely as faith, and go down in a 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


109 


troubled sea. Some time ago the whole world 
was thrilled by that daring Australian, Hawker, 
as he cut from beneath him every hope so far 
as men knew, and started out, winging his way 
over the ocean, dependent upon the actual ac¬ 
complishment of his goal as the only deliver¬ 
ance before him. As he faded from the vision 
of the watchers on the shore and sank below the 
horizon, beyond which was so many miles of 
watered horizon, he put the thrill of risk for 
our ideal glowing, in all our breasts. There 
have been a great many since Abraham who 
have dared to follow the risk heroic, of his farth¬ 
est going, w T hen he went out not knowung 
whither he went. The travelers have not all 
arrived at their destination, so far as men know T . 
But w r e have come to the place in the history of 
mankind, I am sure, when the faith of Christian¬ 
ity shall refuse longer to wait for weather con¬ 
ditions and shall calmly proceed to its challeng¬ 
ing task. 

First. “Thy kingdom come,” becomes my 
prayer. Jesus knew how very essential it was 
that whatever was to be accomplished in service 
in the world must first become the earnest prayer 
of those who are to do it. The Kingdom could 
not be risked on earth among men, unless it first 
became the great desire of men. There is much 
more in prayer than a mere pleading on our part 
to persuade God to do a thing we simply desire 


110 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


to have done. I fear there are many who have 
interpreted prayer as an economical way, really 
as so economical a method as to tend to cheap¬ 
ness, to get something done which otherwise they 
might have to do themselves. If I can but en¬ 
list God to do my work for me, I shall be willing 
to make that an object of my prayer. How weai 
and unworthy such motive is! Jesus established 
the basis of prayer in his people in order to set 
them on fire with a great purpose which was 
to be heroically attained one triumphant day. If 
“Thy kingdom come” becomes the united prayer 
of all his people, they will more and more become 
enlisted in genuine and expectant interest in its 
coming. A basal zeal in that prayer is what has 
always made, and makes to-day, the genuine mis¬ 
sionary. Nothing but missions can be logical 
for folks who pray as Jesus taught us to pray. 
We must not forget that vital truth as couched 
by someone in a sentence to live—“It was not 
the church that made the gospel, but it was the 
gospel that made the church.” That is founda¬ 
tional. In all the great history of the church 
thus far, this great petition has been grounding 
itself deep in our souls as a convincing prayer. 
Through great years, and long hard years too, 
and across sometimes staggering centuries, it has 
been necessary to lead our people on, while this 
settled deeper into their lives. The yearning for 
the experience of the thing for which we have 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


111 


prayed has constantly increased. The history 
of the church thus far has been largely written 
around a prayerful waiting for this consumma¬ 
tion. The great martyrs, whose stories we read 
with gratitude as we trace their passing through 
flame and r smoke, were leaving undying testi¬ 
mony of the establishment of the faith. Fire 
could not scare it out of the hearts of folks who 
had it. Nero could not hound it out of women 
and children, even though he set mad, wild, hun¬ 
gry lions upon them to kill them for a public 
spectacle; still the faith. The world then settled 
down into a long, maybe monotonous, period of 
unconcern, to see if folks who believed in God 
could actually cling to their belief through years 
and even generations of disinterestedness. That 
was a hard test. There were many who faltered. 
It is harder for faith to survive all lack of in¬ 
terest than to live triumphantly through the 
fire of persecution. But the prayer never died 
out. Earnest men and women, all down the 
years, and down all the years, have agonized to 
God, and called with passionate souls through 
the dull sustained pain of an unconcerned mul¬ 
titude about them: “Thy kingdom come! O God, 
Thy kingdom come!” Here and there have al¬ 
ways been found noble men and women, who 
have been willing to sacrifice position and riches, 
or whatever was necessary, just to help set the 
evidences of the Kingdom’s faith in countries 


112 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


far and near. The history of this three-worded 
text of ours now has truly been written in hero¬ 
ics all down the human story, but it has thus far 
not advanced beyond the position of a prayer. 
A prayer which has in it an aim that can be 
comprehended in any degree by a purpose of the 
one who prays, must wait the development of 
that point at which the prayer becomes a con¬ 
viction. This leads me to my second interpreta¬ 
tion, the matter I more particularly desire to 
say, and to say which I have said what I already 
have said. 

Second. “Thy kingdom come” must not remain 
merely my prayer; it must become my program. 
That is the travail of soul which has been upon 
the church in late years, as it has been realizing 
the responsibility which attended the transfor¬ 
mation of a genuine prayer into an announced 
campaign. We have prayed our prayer into a 
conviction. Men who pray as Jesus taught them 
to pray cannot keep that prayer on bended knee 
in mere waiting, but must arise to the full as¬ 
sumption of whatever the coming of an answer 
will entail. 

There happened a few years ago at Niagara 
Falls an event which I am sure bore all the logic 
of the years, and gave evidence of new respon¬ 
sibility. It was the first visible endeavor to ex¬ 
press the growing passion for the conquest of 
the world that soon became a consuming flame 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


113 


across our whole church. The suggestion for 
raising a huge sum of money at a time when the 
war was monopolizing the great financial forces 
of the world w T as declared to be beyond all rea¬ 
son. But a selected conference was called, and 
a small company of earnest men and women 
dared to unstop their ears and listen to the cry 
of a whole world’s need. They declared the time 
had come for the transposition of their prayer 
into an actual program. They were meeting in 
a hotel at Niagara Falls, from whose windows 
the flying mists of the great cataract could be 
seen, and into whose halls the roar of the run¬ 
away power made constant echo. As the com¬ 
pany prayed and talked together there the in¬ 
fluence of the great falls forced itself into their 
consideration and molded much the phraseology 
they used. The editorial columns of The Chris¬ 
tian Advocate recorded a doubly meaningful in¬ 
cident, which because of the death of the great 
Christian of whom it is recorded, has now be¬ 
come doubly significant to us all. The final talk 
of the convention was made by Bishop Bash- 
ford, and it proved to be almost his last speech. 
He looked so frail as his tall form arose. His 
great shoulders were visibly bowed under the bur¬ 
den of China which he had so long borne. His 
body was racked by a severe cough which at times 
well nigh choked his utterance. He spoke very 
deliberately, and evidently was overwhelmed 


114 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


with the seriousness of the decision about to be 
made. His closing words carry to-day an un¬ 
usual sacredness, for he being dead yet speaketh. 
“I trust,” said he, “that no man will vote for 
this program unless he is willing to back it with 
whatever personal cost it may come to mean, 
even to the giving of life. With that under¬ 
standing I am willing to vote for it with both of 
my hands.” There stood one of the most heroic 
characters of all the missionary story, with his 
great physical frame actually trembling to col¬ 
lapse, with both hands solemnly uplifted voting 
to make his long prayer the church’s program. 
“Thy kingdom come!” My faith never was 
stronger that that is the great growing in¬ 
tention of the church than it is now. I am not 
worried over the defeat and break-down of the 
church. I do not believe Christianity is failing 
in the world. There never has been in my knowl¬ 
edge a time when the Church of Christ was so 
thoroughly alive to its task, and had with such 
determination set itself to bring in the victory 
of our Lord and his kingdom as to-day. If there 
be any who in espousing the cause of the church 
to-day think they can avoid an actual forward 
march to the very front lines in a determined 
campaign against the intrenchment of every¬ 
thing that is wrong in this world, they are 
doomed to disappointment. You cannot wear 
the name “Christian” and be at ease in Zion in 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


115 


days such as these. We have not been called to 
support and maintain the bulwarks of any ex¬ 
isting order that may not incorporate the whole 
truth of our Lord. We are the rather commis¬ 
sioned everywhere to be heralds of a better 
order which is to be. These are days when 
Christianity must work out its program. Thy 
kingdom come, O God! I accept the task it 
means. I do not propose that my prayer shall 
be made the sum of my effort. “Thy kingdom 
shall come” has now become the determination 
of my faith. Whenever my prayer shall become 
my faith and assume the desire it expresses as 
its program, I expect soon to be on the march. I 
know we all feel the wound and hurt of the war, 
but it has shocked many people into a new sense 
of their spiritual condition. We had all grown 
satisfied with a small horizon made of brick and 
stone, and laid down narrow city streets. To¬ 
day, as by some fell blow of terrific explosion, 
those walls are down flat. Maybe through tears, 
but looking up through vistas shrouded with 
sorrow, and hung round with tragedy supreme, 
folks who had grown callous to the best interests 
of others have now found out that there is a 
larger and a better world around them than 
they had ever dreamed of. 

Doctor Jowett has said one where, that “behind 
and beneath all the tasks and necessities, and 
the common groundwork of them all, in which 


116 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


they are all rooted, is our modern sin, spreading 
like our soil throughout the world, the bed and 
groundwork of all our deepest woes.” All that 
does not strike proof into my conviction that the 
church has failed. For when has the world in 
all its history known all this as any less true? 
Sin is not modern. Such things, arisen to our 
vision as Doctor Jowett notes, are at least evi¬ 
dence that we see them, and our feeling toward 
them is sure proof that our program is in direct 
collision with every wrong. The world is call¬ 
ing for the fullest evidence of our faith in re¬ 
deeming grace. That call comes challenging all 
of us who have dared to pray, “Thy kingdom 
come,” and expects us to passionately set our¬ 
selves to help bring it in. That call has now 
arisen from what was once a mere dull hunger 
and conscious need to a veritable clamor. It 
comes swelling up to us from the unrest and 
emptiness which is in our age. Everywhere, 
from lands far away, from the supposed centers 
of active progress, and from people whose living 
heretofore has been a dull satisfaction of ignor¬ 
ance as to the actions of other people, the call 
has now arisen. They are opening their century- 
dulled eyes to see and their age-bound lips to 
speak. Everywhere, everywhere the world of 
men is calling—calling out of long-endured de¬ 
lusions, calling through deep cravings and 
desires, calling from weariness and sin. There 


THE CHURCH’S PROGRAM 


117 


cannot be any questioning of tbis by any honest 
Christian who will listen to-day. I simply arise 
to ask, how fares the church before such a crisis? 
Is it ready? Is it ready in you? Is there among 
us now that boldness which will eagerly respond 
to the thrill of such a call, or do we find ourselves 
moving, where we do move, in an evident reluc¬ 
tance that testifies to timidity and even fear? 
Is the church staggering in doubt and unbelief, 
or is it leaping forward in the glorious inspira¬ 
tion of a quenchless hope? These are questions 
that should be granted the testing place at all 
our conduct now. Personally, I never felt so 
much confidence in our cause as I feel to-day. 
I am ashamed of myself and of my little and 
very evident unworthiness, but I am greatly 
delighted in my Christ, and in the power of his 
great gospel. I believe profoundly in the pro¬ 
gram which is written in our great prayer. I 
would not perpetuate at my lips a prayer which 
I feared to make my program, nor would I accept 
a program for my life that was not first the sin¬ 
cere prayer of my heart. Thy kingdom come! 
O God, what can I do to help it on? I know the 
difficulty of the day. I know the fight before 
us. I know there are many who are discouraged 
and sad, and who cannot see how we can ever 
hope to win this world. But none of these things 
confound my faith. I have never had a faith 
which was founded on an easy ideal to attain. 


118 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


I have a faith which is founded alone upon the 
character of an omnipotent God. It is all I 
have to keep up my courage, but I cannot think 
of any other basis that could remain. And with 
that faith I would take my stand now. One day 
when war was at its worst, and discouragement 
was running boldly against many a warm heart 
in Europe, I met a wonderful soldier, from whom 
with difficulty I got fragments of the deed that 
had set his picture everywhere about England, 
and had prompted the King to decorate him with 
the Victoria Cross. I met him one evening in a 
camp of Scotch soldiers shortly after he had been 
decorated. The incident of his bravery was 
brought about in the earlier experiences with 
poisoned gas. Gas-masks were not yet well per¬ 
fected, and men could not long sustain their posi¬ 
tions under the flow of the deadly fumes. A very 
important position had been under gas for some 
time. The dogged bravery of those Scotch troops 
clung out there and choked and gasped toward 
unconsciousness, and refused to give up. All the 
men were dull and stupid. An order came along 
the line to go over the top for a charge. The men 
simply couldn’t go. They staggered in inability. 
Then Daniel Laidlow, as plain looking an old 
Scotch piper as ever hugged the bag of a bagpipe, 
arose from all the obscurity in which he thus 
far had lived, and took his place among the 
world’s foremost list of brave men. He flung off 


THE CHURCH'S PROGRAM 


119 


his mask, and leaped upon the exposed parapet 
where shot and shell whistled and roared, and 
marched back and forth before those strangling 
men, playing the most thrilling airs he knew, 
until he literally played them right up out of 
those gas-filled trenches, and over the top and 
out to a full victory. O men and women to-day, 
with Christ’s name on our lips in declared faith; 
if sometimes the depression of the hard task 
does seem to come dow r n upon us, and crush us 
into a feeling of helplessness, and we lie prone 
and listless before the great crying duty just 
ahead, can we not see this great Hero of ours, 
“Whose name is above every name,” “Whose we 
are and Whom we serve,” marching fearlessly 
and ever confident before us, teaching us to pray, 
“Thy kingdom come,” in order that we may go 
out in unswerving loyalty to apply our lives 
and our best endeavors to make “Thy kingdom 
come” also the passion of our utmost effort? 


VII 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 

“Thus saith the Lord of hosts; In those days it shall 
come to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all 
languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt 
of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for 
we have heard that God is with you.”—Zechariah 8. 23. 

There is religious dynamic in that verse. It is 
one of the clearest verses on evangelism to be 
found in the Bible. It is primary in its prin¬ 
ciples. Not because they were Jews, but because 
God was with them, was to be their attractive 
power. Those Jews were all too liable to pride 
over their own peculiar position. They were 
wont to bask in their interpreted favors, as if 
they bore credentials of personal value. It was 
a constant effort to keep them in right perspec¬ 
tive toward God. The argument and value of 
this verse lie in the contention that the only 
dynamic of church progress and success always 
has been, and always will be found, in the fact 
that God is in it. There is peculiar fitness 
in emphasis of this fact to-day. There has been 
started a keen interest in the world about us, in 
an apparent effort of the church to cater for at- 
120 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 121 


tention in other and ordinary ways. What will 
turn the eyes of the people to the church? is 
being answered by those to-day who would with 
the skill of mere advertisement find the catch¬ 
words or lines that will actually fill the pews 
and thus justify the endeavor. I would not 
oppose the method, if any shall choose to use it; 
I would only ask that the advertisements be 
strictly confined to the real values we have. I 
cannot think of a greater advertisement a com¬ 
pany could have before any community than that 
which would make actually apparent to that 
community the fact that among those folks 
called church folks God was always present. 
That is not difficult to discover. That does not 
require expensive campaign to publish. It is 
strange how God being around cannot be hid. 
It is encouraging to know that wherever he is, 
is an attractive place for folks. Attraction is 
religion’s best compulsion. You cannot argue 
religion into men. You cannot drive people to 
church. You can win men to religion. You can 
attract folks to church. 

Not long ago there died out of our Christian 
work in this world a man whose influence has 
been of the rarest power. He lived his great 
life in close contact with human derelicts. At 
his funeral the preacher, Doctor Chapman, said, 
"If greatness is to be measured by a passion for 
souls, by a spirit of love, and by a Christlikeness 


122 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


in all that he said, or did, or thought, then I say 
I believe Samuel Hadley was easily one of the 
greatest men in the city of New York, if not in 
the whole of the United States.” A few years 
ago I was speaking at a convention in a Western 
city, and Mr. Hadley was sitting on the platform, 
in readiness to speak at the close of my words. 
The platform of the church had been enlarged to 
make room for a chorus of singers. The exten¬ 
sion had been made with heavy planks over the 
altar rail and across the front aisle, and up very 
close to the first pews, allowing the occupation of 
those seats by those who were willing thus to 
sit with their heads just showing above the plat¬ 
form. Two personal friends of mine who had 
come from another city only for the personal 
element of our acquaintance, and having come 
in after the congregation had gathered, were 
ushered into the very front seat. They were 
professional musicians, the lady an organist and 
the gentleman an accomplished musical director. 
They were cultured people, and very particular 
about the form of religious service. Their musi¬ 
cal sense was unusually sensitive. They had 
never heard of Sam Hadley, and knew nothing 
of the great message of his life and ministry. 
When I had finished speaking, and before my 
friends knew what was to happen, the great 
mission preacher went limping on his big iron 
shoe out to the front of the platform and began 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 123 


to sing in his wonderfully poor voice, and in a 
very unmusical manner, a quite unmusical tune, 

“Oh, it is wonderful. 

Very, very wonderful. 

How Jesus came. 

And came to save me.” 

I saw my friends sink in their cultured concep¬ 
tion of a religious song, and when the singer had 
finished, their heads were not visible from where 
I sat. When the last dull note died away, the 
singer commented on the people not knowing 
such a good tune, and then told one of those 
wonderful stories of the power of God to save 
poor sinful men. Then he said, “Now sing it with 
me;” and in the same poor voice led a number 
who had caught the rhythm of the verse as they 
sang it a second time. Then he told another 
story. It was one of those heart-deep stories 
he knew so w y ell how to tell, and as he told it the 
great audience was wonderfully moved, and 
when he stamped his big iron shoe and called on 
everyone to sing the song, a great chorus went 
up from that congregation, and I saw the heads 
of my friends coming up again. Then Hadley 
told a yet more wonderful story of the rescue 
of a poor wreck of a man, and the people cried 
till a great sob swept over the entire audience, 
and that song caught hold of every heart and 
swept up till I am sure the choirs of heaven must 


124 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


have caught the genuine harmony of the simple 
strain, and there on the front seat, with the tears 
pouring down their faces, sat my friends singing 
with all their hearts, 

“Oh, it is wonderful, 

Very, very wonderful, 

How Jesus came. 

And came to save me.” 

They experienced the attraction of a God-filled 
individual. The secret of potent evangelism is 
there. Not that we shall be compelled to per¬ 
suade men by argument. Not that we shall be 
reduced to any of a variety of methods to gain 
attention, but that the practice of the presence 
of God shall be the sufficient attraction of the 
church. It always has been, it is to-day, and I 
doubt not always will remain, that the greatest 
power the church has for its campaign of the 
world is the endowment of God in its life. 

We are not suffering for new ideas. The pul¬ 
pit is not in need of new ideas to preach. What 
we all need, people and preachers, is power to 
help us realize a high individual Christian life, 
power, as someone has said, “that will make us 
daring enough to act out all we have seen in 
vision, all we have learned in principle from 
Jesus Christ our Lord.” We are each called to 
offer to the world the irresistible attraction of 
a God-filled life. We have in that call the full 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 125 


right to presume that when that shall have been 
done we shall actually draw others to him. 

Let me call that last remark my first division 
in consideration of this theme. The primary 
power of the winning church is the consecrated 
individual. Of that prime essential we must 
never lose sight. There is no substitute. It is 
not needed that we argue against any other good 
power in order to support this. It is simply the 
acknowledgment of the superiority of Christian 
life in the effectual propagation of the gospel of 
Jesus Christ for the regeneration of humanity. 
It is always an interesting roll call, that regis¬ 
ters the names of those whose clear impress has 
been put upon the plastic life of this world. If 
I should be permitted to make a word, I would 
term these vital lives enhumaned gospels. Why 
not start a new word anyhow? By whose 
authority do words arrive? Enhumaned gospels 
are the powerful points of contact of a saving 
gospel to a lost world. If we lack the peculiar 
potent power of individual consecration in ser¬ 
vice, we lack the real spirit wherein life is put 
into all our forms. The evident power of the 
church is its God-filled people. Let the world, 
amid all it knows by keen experience of life, meet 
the soul that breathes the spirit of Jesus Christ; 
see him move through familiar facts of compli¬ 
cate difficulty; watch him in heart-rending sor¬ 
row, shot through with biting pain, but sus- 


126 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


tained and soothed by an unfaltering trust. 
Let men see such a life, sipping joy and aflame 
with the presence of God, and they are drawn 
to religion. It is the God-filled soul that draws 
men and women to the Kingdom. The blessed 
church! God knows I love it with all my heart. 
It affords me the companionships I most highly 
prize. I will give my all for its work. It can 
have my life, and every talent I possess, and all 
the regret I feel in making such a gift is that it 
is so little and so poor. I love the Church of 
God. But the church as the church does not 
touch men for God. It is always the individual. 
All our history is ablaze with that. It is demon¬ 
strated as the evangelistic dynamic all down the 
church’s story. I remember the account I saw 
of the burial service of an aged minister. He 
had finished his life-work of many years, in a 
community that knew the influence of his 
presence. A great company of appreciative 
folks filled the church where loving hands that 
had been taught in kindness by him had borne 
his casket. Some brethren of the ministry had 
spoken of his noble manhood. They praised his 
fine, unselfish ministry of half a century on com¬ 
paratively small charges. They cited the beauti¬ 
ful consecration of his life as a contented, happy, 
consistent winner of souls. Then a man arose 
from the audience, and walking impressively 
down the aisle, stopped before the flower-covered 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 127 


casket, and picked out from beneath the beauti¬ 
ful pieces a little unarranged withered bouquet, 
and holding it high that all might see, he said: 
“This bouquet, unnoticed by almost all of you, 
is the beautiful confirmation of all the tributes 
which have been paid to this good man, whose 
body we come now to bury. When this Chris¬ 
tian gentleman came to live in this; town, he 
was everywhere effectively zealous in his efforts 
to win souls to God. One day as he was passing 
along he heard a lad who was playing at a game 
in the street swearing harshly. He went inter¬ 
estedly and kindly to the boy, and in a manner 
characteristic of the real endowment of Chris¬ 
tianity spoke to him and won his attention and 
respect. In a short time that boy was a scholar 
in the Sunday school here. Not long afterward 
he stood at the altar of this church, to take the 
sacred vows, and begin the life of God’s man 
among men. The old preacher stood beside him 
in glowing interest. Through the months since, 
that boy has proven true to every vow and de¬ 
veloped a fine life for Jesus Christ. To-day it 
was that boy who came here bearing this little 
bouquet in his own hands, prepared by his own 
hands, picked by his own hands from the only 
flowers he owned, the ones that grow wild in the 
open fields. This bouquet is a tribute of love to 
the man who brought him to God.” The com¬ 
munity will never be made to feel the impress of 


128 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


the church upon it as it should feel it until each 
of us who call ourselves Christians shall indeed 
be possessed of the magnetism of the divine 
presence. The characteristic mark put down 
here in our text out of the long ago was worded 
again by the prophet Isaiah, and must remain 
the same always, “Nations that knew not thee 
shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God 
and for the Holy One of Israel; for He hath 
glorified thee.” 

If my contention be true, I find myself, there¬ 
fore, dragged by it to a present day bar of judg¬ 
ment. This resultant fact must be the evident 
credential of my discipleship. We should 
be hearing continually from those who meet us, 
“We will go with you, for we have heard that 
God is with you.” I must accept the judgment 
of my contention then. If this be true, then 
there remains but one deduction for us ever to 
make when we find the church not prospering in 
us. God is obligated to the result; we need con¬ 
cern ourselves only as to having him with us. 
If he is with us, the result we can trust to him. 
When the church languishes I cannot doubt 
where the trouble lies. When we have God we 
win. There can be no exception. He is our 
guaranteed endowment. I would say all this in 
most solicitous interest of the church’s advance¬ 
ment. I would press it deep to every heart in 
obligation. Your life! Your life! It was Chris- 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 129 


tian life that transformed the steps of timid un¬ 
known disciples into the tread of conquering 
armies going out everywhere, even pressing 
through the iron gates of heathen Rome and 
demanding attention of the king of the world. 
It was a Christian life that transformed igno¬ 
rant and unlearned fishermen and publicans and 
associated them with scholarly men transformed 
in life, to dispute to conviction on the classic 
hills of Athens. It was Christian life that moved 
fearlessly out on a commission to all the world 
when the bounds of such a commission had not 
yet been dreamed of in men’s minds, and, with¬ 
out scrip, or purse, or prestige, actually an¬ 
nounced their campaign to win the world. It is 
to-day the most vital power in the world, and 
presents before the problematic situation of 
mankind the only hope the nations have as they 
find themselves after all their proud advance¬ 
ment tossed in a fierce tempest of sin, and swept 
by an awful strife of men governed by consum¬ 
ing selfishness. The Christian life, where God 
actually is disclosed in human association, is the 
hope of the world. I ask you to assume in your 
own place the attraction of a life endowed of 
God. Power for such a life is available for each 
of us. The responsibility of failing to bring it 
among men must rest upon us. When a man 
begins to walk with God a strange change comes 
over him. Mark Guy Pearse has a passage some- 


130 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


what thus, in that remarkable little book of his on 
The Christianity of Jesus Christ . I have not the 
words, but the contention. The Christian man 
still walks the familiar path he knew yesterday 
—the flowers, the trees, the brooks, the sky, the 
stars, the storms, the calms, sun and rain; his 
pathway remains. But somehow there seems to 
be a new face to flower, or sky or storm. The 
duties that called him still call him—his shop, 
and market, and field, and street and office; his 
hammer, and trowel, and plow, and pen, and 
book. Familiar things. But there is a new light 
in his soul to-day, and he smites with the 
strength of ten because his heart is pure. He 
bears on his back the very same loads. Tired! 
Heavy old word that. How much he has been 
borne down, and he finds not now any escape 
from a load. He finds even new exhortation to 
bear more burdens, as though his shoulders had 
been strengthened, and not that his task had 
been lessened. There is new strength in his 
arm. He meets the same old faces. Childhood's 
friends are not lost; men and women of familiar 
name; great men bent to great tasks; ordinary 
men at monotonous routine. Children in gay, 
careless laughter—the same faces these. But 
now there is a new radiance of love upon them, 
for he has a greater heart in his breast. He is 
indeed living to-day right where he lived yester¬ 
day, but this is Dr. Pearse's argument: “Yester- 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 131 


day lie walked alone; and to-day lie walks with 
God.” That’s the genius of our religion. That’s 
the evident power of the church. God in us. I 
know how audacious it sounds for such an one 
as am I to dare utter such a claim. I shame, 
God knows, before this little life of mine, to 
pronounce such a belief. Yet my heart fails me 
to think of what I would be if I were left without 
him. Even the great ones failed without him. 
What could I do then? 

I was reading a strange, yet most discerning, 
comment somewhere on the impressive life of 
Charles Darwin. The comment was made, after 
many incidents were given, that his life was, in 
often very strange notes but nevertheless un¬ 
questioning cries, a constant appeal for a defi¬ 
nite faith. The writer declared that the great 
scholar walked carefully along doing his duty 
splendidly, and with single-hearted simplicity, 
but just barely missed the way all the time. “The 
gospel he wanted was just the other side of the 
wall,” was the summarized sentence at the close 
of the interesting comment. I am wondering 
now if the figure of the great scientist is not a 
strong picture of this age of ours. There is so 
very much in our day which argues to unsatis¬ 
faction. So much of our strength just misses 
the way. So many of our great movements stop 
short of the real purpose of it all. There cannot 
be the least doubt in the mind of any carefully 


132 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


observing man to-day that the most difficult 
religious endeavor before this wonderful cen¬ 
tury of ours, that is so proudly enamored of its 
strength and its science and its culture and its 
riches, is to devise some means to keep genuine 
vitality and real faith in the essential doctrines 
of our religion in the hearts of those who have 
reduced their religious life to a mere nominal 
adherence. We are not now troubled with a 
bold infidelity. That can be met, when once 
disclosed. But, while the presence of unbelief 
may not be bold, it is not hard for any good ob¬ 
server to discover a very widespread spirit of 
doubt, and deadening unconcern toward the fun¬ 
damentals of our belief. I covet the complete 
religious triumph of the church, I covet all our 
people aflame with God. It is to no mere cam¬ 
paign of sanitary plumbing and good ventila¬ 
tion. All of that we will do to-day, and rightly 
so, as a matter of public safety. The social clean¬ 
up is sheer logic of our ordinary sense. I covet 
now a distinctly religious triumph. Splendid 
old Rutherford knew what it was when he sang 
his little song, 

“If one soul from Anworth, 

Meet me at God’s right hand, 

My heaven -will be two heavens. 

In Emmanuel’s Land.” 

There is but one business worth while. One of 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 133 


our judges, just from the thriving dockets of his 
court, where men were forever contending with 
passion over matters that were secondary, 
stopped to talk with me one evening just before I 
was to speak on a street-corner where I had been 
preaching the gospel a good many times. He 
said, “Why don’t you preach a series of sermons 
on ‘What is Worth While?’ ” We all know what 
he was struggling with. The court where men 
drive so hard, and buy costly counsel in strife 
over things the possession of which will so soon 
be shaken frdm their palsy-struck hands by 
death that knows no court, arises from its sit¬ 
ting to ask, “What is Worth While?” There is 
but one business worth while. It took prece¬ 
dence even at the throne of heaven. It conscripted 
even the only Son of God. It was the only task 
that could conscript heaven. It consumed 
Christ with its great passion. There is nothing 
which offers such dividends to life as does this. 
Yet is there nothing which requires of life the 
absolute emptying of itself as does this. It must 
ever remain that it is not by might, nor by power, 
but only by the Spirit of God. Then men shall 
follow him in whom God may be found, not be¬ 
cause of the man but because of his Guest. When 
Jesus Christ trod the earth it is recorded as 
being said one day by some Pharisees who had 
been plotting to get rid of him, and to whom his 
presence was a constant rebuke, “Behold how 


134 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


we prevail nothing; the world has gone after 
him.” The God-filled life will win. The church’s 
only attraction has ever been, is to-day, and will 
ever be, God in its life. We cannot think of it 
as anything less, or as anything else, and it is 
guaranteed power to live such a life that is 
offered to all who will receive him. When John 
Irvine came to die I stood beside his bed. The 
group of his loved ones had watched him make 
ready to go for some time. He had lived a long 
life of service wherein he himself never shone. 
He had kept a light to show sailors the w r ay. 
When storms blew hard, and seas leaped in fury, 
it was the light John Irvine kept that the ships 
sailed by. For all a long life that faithful man 
had put that light against the darkness. Few 
knew him. A multitude followed his light. As 
death drew near and darkness came down upon 
him, he mustered his failing strength and lifting 
his tired head turned his face to the window and 
asked “Is the light burning?” And we all said, 
“Yes.” And he lay still a moment. The wind 
howled across the chimney, and whipped against 
the casement. Visions of high waves, and look¬ 
out in mad seas, were in his soul, and he once 
more summoned all the strength he had, and 
raising his faithful head asked with all the con¬ 
centrate interest of a whole life’s ministry in his 
earnestness, “Is the light burning?” And it was 
pitch dark, but for the light which he so faith- 


THE CHURCH’S ATTRACTION 135 


fully kept. The gleam of that ray has been in 
my way down the years. Not John Irvine, but 
the light he kept. God in us. “We will go with 
you, for we have heard that God is with you.” 


VIII 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 

“Feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with 
his own blood.”—Acts 20. 28. 

The Church of God is the best investment 
ever offered as an opportunity for life. Our day, 
eloquent as no other day has ever been with 
schemes of the professional promoter, should be 
in a mood to consider the church as a safe in¬ 
vestment. It is time the church was presented 
to men not as mere toleration but as unbounded 
opportunity. I would not seem to make its ap¬ 
peal thus as justified merely on the insurance 
side of our values, as Mr. Babson so very well 
argues. I would, rather, make it the outstand¬ 
ing opportunity before men, who realize that 
from mere financial opportunity they have al¬ 
ready made wise selection and placed their 
available means in fertile propositions upon 
whose dividends they are placing a comfortable 
confidence against old age and failing health. 
After all, the mere investment of property, no 
matter how well it is done, does not carry com¬ 
plete satisfaction. We want the opportunity of 
life that offers the investment of ourselves in 
things that lie beyond the realm of our money. 

136 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 137 


It may be a bit unusual to have the church pre¬ 
sented thus, but I am full convinced it is an 
essential appeal when properly put. Religion 
has always had to suffer at the hands of men 
who would exploit it. Men have sought from it 
that which they could get out of it. I want to 
stand squarely before every such interpretation 
of the church, and present it to your attention 
not as a reward, but as an opportunity. 

Nor would I have you cut the measure of your 
relationship to the church by so small a pattern 
as mere duty. A dying man beside whom I sat 
one day, and with whom I was talking about the 
great call of personal faith in God, said to me in 
that utterly wide-of-the-mark idea very com¬ 
monly held about religion’s appeal, “Oh, yes, I 
believe all men ought to belong to the church.” 
The church as a duty is an unfair measure of it, 
and has never won for it any very effectual 
allegiance. There are those who give money to 
the church merely because they think they ought 
to do so. Many a business man in some little 
response to some appeal has thus performed a 
feeble “ought,” for the church. All that is a 
fatal avenue for loss of power. A man never 
goes very far, nor very nobly, religiously, as an 
obligation, and what little going he does do thus 
is tired and unhappy. Enthusiasm in service 
never found birth in such condition. 

I propose the Church of Jesus Christ as our 


138 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


best investment, and make bold to say that it 
offers the one really great opportunity for the 
safe placing of your life, which, after all, is the 
only really great investment any of us ever have 
to make, and is still the one about which we 
figure the least. Our cities are full of business 
men who pride themselves in their keen sense of 
values, and think in wonderful accuracy along 
the lines of dividends upon invested capital, and 
yet they are not giving any thought to the seri¬ 
ous fact that the most precious possession they 
have is not bringing them a single per cent of 
interest. Their lives are not invested. What a 
man does with his life is far more important 
than what he does with his money. And yet 
we who can sense six per cent afar off, are utterly 
indifferent to the cessation of dividends in life 
investment. 

I am told often in conversation, and in the 
literature critical upon our day, that the passion 
of this day is turned toward amusements. It is 
anything but complimentary for us now to agree 
to that, at such a time when the world is still 
draining the dregs of the bitter sorrow of the 
most awful war man ever staggered through. An 
incident happened in a camp of training soldiers 
where I chanced to be one day that made great 
impress on my appreciation of what plain con¬ 
duct could mean in a crisis. I had gone into the 
camp to see my son, who was soon to leave for 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 139 


France. I had just come back from those suf¬ 
fering fields, over there, and the pull of them 
was on me, and the strange atmosphere which 
was created, in an artificial effort to make life 
gay and careless around the soldiers, seemed to 
choke my sense of the great gripping sorrow that 
was crushing the world’s heart. A French officer 
had been sent to drill the men. Beyond the 
drill he could see the actual war he well knew. 
Some one in the town, in eager interest to do 
something, arranged a ball, and invited the 
Frenchman. He sent them back a most polite 
refusal with the words, “I cannot dance here, 
while my brothers die there.” The far-flying 
application of that reply must strike keenly at 
much of our conduct. Who are we to-day, to 
whose ears the sobs of suffering millions still 
are plain, above and beyond all the loud huz- 
zahs that victory could proclaim; we to whose 
knowledge there has come the assurance of 
many millions in actual starvation’s need? Who 
are we, in so tragic a day as is this, through 
whose late found peace runs the haunt of a cer¬ 
tain dull liability of all we prize in civilization; 
who are we to be talking now about amusements? 
There is so very much in this world now that 
demands all the real strength that life can mean 
in any one of us, that it is a very small measure 
for us to offer the world, this matter of how good 
a time we can have. 


140 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


When we step up out of this hard day for the 
final judgment of God, and see our lives meas¬ 
ured as to what we have done, the standards 
before which we have dared judge a good time 
will look so cheap, we will never agree to them 
there. We must measure ourselves beside a 
world where genuine woe has been spilled to a 
very flood of suffering; a world where actual 
hunger stalks abroad; a world where actual 
nakedness shrinks before winter. These are not 
days to tolerate the complaint of loss of ease. 
We must catch the real balance of life which is 
found by making life’s best offering rather than 
demanding its greedy desires. The actual pos¬ 
session of things we greatly desire may utterly 
wreck our satisfaction. Jesus was vividly 
showing this in his wonderful story of the prodi¬ 
gal son, by the wide differences in the young 
man when he first in selfishness cried out to his 
father, “Give me my portion”; and again, when 
at the far end of his folly, in the hog-lot of his 
losses, he resolved, “I will arise and go to my 
father and say, Make me as one of thy hired 
servants.” Give me, and make me, were the two 
extremes. A man never writes a very great pro¬ 
gram for himself around the general theme of 
“give me.” He starts no high career with such 
a slogan. He sets no pace for heroism there. 
Yet I am sure the word strikes close to the dis¬ 
tinguishing motive of much life to-day. Maybe 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 141 


it has required a war that would shake the very 
foundations of the world to reset the stones of 
society, and drive out selfishness from our souls. 
“Give me,” was running rife in life. So complete 
was its grip on some that while heroic darings 
and unselfishness came from many, there were 
yet those who saw then an opportunity to coin 
even that to their own coffers, and so eagerly 
did they reach for their own that they picked up 
some things that had blood on them. But there 
were those—and many, thank God—who learned 
a nobler thing. They cast self-interest aside, and 
with faces bathed in earnest tears, and with 
eyes fixed on nobler ministry, heroically cried to 
God: “Make me! Make me, Lord.” 

I have dared thus to touch those suffering 
days, the like of which we pray God the world 
shall never have to know again, just to say that 
the Christian way of living is not to be minis¬ 
tered unto, but to minister. The entrustment of 
life must be made to count for good. That is 
our best investment. You can get your money 
placed where it will bring you a good return. 
That may be a very good thing to do, though I 
doubt the full satisfaction of merely drawing 
your dividends as credentials of your success. 
Who made your dividends? What we want 
now is just as honest and as passionate an en¬ 
deavor to find the safe investment of life as we 
do of money. I was sitting in a street-car beside 


142 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


a workman going home from the factory one 
day, and we were talking about life as it hap¬ 
pened to look just then, and he said as somewhat 
of a summary of his questionings: “We work all 
day to make money, and half the night to spend 
it; what we need is some one to tell us what it is 
all about.” The church asks attention here. 

When we call for life investment we cannot 
bring small or unworthy ideals. You might 
afford to risk some of your money in small ven¬ 
tures. It is not an irrecoverable matter to lose 
your money. I knew an old man once classed as 
wealthy. He made some poor investments, and 
at seventy years of age was a poor man again. 
He swung his old pack-sack over his strong 
shoulder, and bravely went out into the North 
Woods, and found an iron mine and died a mil¬ 
lionaire. I sat all night long beside one of my 
dearest friends whose property had all been 
swept away as by a flood to leave him a poor 
man. I watched him come back once more to a 
place of power in business. It is not an irrecov¬ 
erable calamity for a man to lose his money. But 
you cannot afford to lose your life. I would 
offer the Church of Jesus Christ as the greatest 
opportunity opened in this world for your life. 
I have been reading that gripping story of Silas 
Marner, the miser. How he came home at late 
hours from work which he loved only because 
he got money for it. The door of his lone abode 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 143 


was carefully shut and locked. The curtains 
were all drawn close. Every corner was searched 
to make sure of his loneness. Then from the 
secret place in the floor he lifted his golden treas¬ 
ure. He counted and recounted it. He washed 
his grasping hands in it. He fell asleep with his 
tired face buried in it. Gold! Gold! Gold! 
He awakened with a startle, and clutched it all 
up, making sure he has not lost any, and hid it 
away in the secret place again. One night after 
he had made sure he was alone, he lifted the 
secret tile to behold gaunt emptiness staring at 
him. His gold was all gone. You know the story 
of his hunt. But Marner lost his gold to find 
a better life. I pity the man, Marner or any 
other man, who one hard day, after the world 
has all run out, and he has come in and pulled 
down the curtains and chinked the doors to for¬ 
bid any other eye, goes to look before God for his 
life and finds he has absolutely lost it. Placed 
it wrong, wasted it in riotous living, thrown it 
away in mere aimlessness. God pity the man 
who invests life wrong. I propose the church 
as your best investment. Those who put life 
there must feel they have contact with all that is 
best. The church will take your life everywhere 
in ministry. There is not a need in this needy 
world it will not lead you up to. There is not 
a need it would avoid. It winds no skirts of 
avoidance about it in defense. It does not pass 


144 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


by on the other side any distress that lies across 
this world. Every alley of despair is on its call¬ 
ing list. Not a broken stair or a bare room it has 
not interest in. Life cannot run so far in sin or 
wretchedness as to escape its solicitation. The 
Church of Jesus Christ was organized and set to 
the task of saving this world, by Him who saw 
what the world was to be saved from. I take my 
chief joy in urging this great life investment 
upon men and women. 

I used to have a good friend, a Christian Jew 
in Odessa in Russia, who told me the wonderful 
story of a poor little Russian Jewess, who was 
left for dead on the streets of Odessa,, a supposed 
victim of a mob that swept through troubled 
streets and killed a multitude. The girl awoke 
to consciousness amid the dead of her own fam¬ 
ily, who lay all about her there, and whose 
broken forms she could see in the glare of the 
burning houses along the street. She dragged 
her badly beaten body to the steps of a near-by 
house, and fell fainting there, only to be recov¬ 
ered to consciousness later in some quiet place, 
where she was hovered over by some whose kind¬ 
ness was endeavoring to lure life back again. 
Her body was restored to health. She made her 
escape from her troubled home, and in that 
strange ability to journey, which has written 
romance across many a poor immigrant’s 
career, came to America. She made her way. 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 145 


A great passion was compelling her soul. 
She worked out an education. On the day 
of her graduation she had the unusual honors 
of her class in one of America’s large col¬ 
leges. She then turned her face once more 
to the land of her sorrows, which was to 
be the land now of her service. As she left 
America she set ringing in the ears of all who 
can ever come to know the life of Jessie Smith 
her fine declaration of the investment of her life 
for the good of the world. When I think 
through such an opportunity as that bruised, 
ignorant, unknown, but barely living girl, drag¬ 
ging her bleeding body off the street, could make 
for divine direction, I wonder what God could 
do with the choice youth of this richly oppor¬ 
tune day, if the same passion for service should 
be granted right of way in their lives. 

I was interested in a story I heard a preacher 
tell one day in a meeting of preachers in spiritual 
council over some needed church work they were 
planning. The discussion had turned to the 
need of passionate appreciation of our task, and 
a minister arose and told this incident that had 
happened in a church he knew in his boyhood. 
A young man desired to become a missionary 
and had offered his life as such to the church. 
The father would not agree. They had a serious 
argument in the home, and finally agreed to 
leave it to the session of their church. The ses- 


146 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


sion was called for that special consideration. 
Father and son were there. When the meeting 
was called to order, the pastor requested a char¬ 
acteristic old farmer of plain, straight ways, but 
of unswerving loyalty to divine leadership, to 
lead in prayer. The prayer was short and direct. 
He prayed: “O God, thou knowest thy servant 
Mills, who dedicated to thee in baptism his son, 
to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Now thou 
desirest the young man for a missionary, and 
thy servant Mills is mad. Amen.” Mills imme¬ 
diately got to his feet and said, “Mr. President, 
this session was called to settle a dispute be¬ 
tween my son and I. There is no dispute be¬ 
tween us any more since that prayer. I move 
we adjourn.” The meeting adjourned and the 
life of another faithful missionary had begun. 
The Church of Christ is still the greatest oppor¬ 
tunity for life investment known among men. 

God has intrusted to us the most difficult day 
to justify living through that has ever been in¬ 
trusted to any generation. It is far more diffi¬ 
cult now to vindicate our right to live and in¬ 
herit the blood-bought responsibilities of this 
hour than it was even to go out and die to bring 
this hour in, for we must now justify our inheri¬ 
tance. You can, if you choose, go on and out of 
this searching day, and leave absolutely nothing 
behind you of influence. You can die a death 
at some not-far distant day, and be carted off 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 147 


somewhere to a quiet field and buried, and 
marked with a little or a big stone—little mat¬ 
ters it—that will be your chief, aye, your only 
marker. Or you can here and now make ready 
the contribution of your life that will register 
you in service. I had rather leave the contribu¬ 
tion of my dedicated life in some vital institu¬ 
tion that would come on down the years and con¬ 
centrate forever about it the diviner ideals of 
city and country place; an institution that would 
maintain open doors to an altar where men and 
women and children could kneel in holy com¬ 
munion and consecration; an institution that 
would furnish an ever-available calm and sure 
retreat for souls pursued by sin; that would 
make permanent a pulpit where the message of 
God’s love should be proclaimed down the years; 
that would unstop the sacred melodies of great 
hymns to sing to drooping souls in discourage¬ 
ment the eternal optimism of Christian hope; I 
would point to the church of Jesus Christ and 
declare that I had rather have my whole life in¬ 
vested in its great and ever-increasing service, 
than any or all other investments this world 
has yet offered. I have little but this all too 
little life of mine to invest, but with the pro¬ 
found prayer that it may be purged “even so as 
by fire,” if necessary, that it be more worthy of 
investment in so sacred an opportunity, I would 
bring it to the Church of Jesus Christ, and offer 


148 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


it all. We stand upon sacred ground in Chris¬ 
tianity to-day. Our place was not won without 
sacrifice. Noblest men and women have wrought 
their very life-blood into the foundations. Surely 
we will not dare pass on to our successors any 
less evidence of real devotion to the cause. 
Surely, we will not dare clasp into the plastic 
condition of this tried age the fingerprints of 
mere selfishness. These are disturbed days. Just 
what such disturbance shall ultimately mean in 
vital reconstruction of human society we may not 
know. But we are sure there stands before every 
earnest soul with a genuine offering to bring an 
effectual and an open door. Failure is always a 
calamity, but failure of those who have the op¬ 
portunity of a crisis is doubly tragic. The day is 
being ministered to by many good things, which 
are just short of the best, and that is the dull 
failure of much of our day. I am proposing the 
church as our supreme investment for life here, 
because it immediately challenges the world in 
you with the claims of God. How the church 
has declared its priceless dividends in life! What 
flowers of fragrance have sprung from it! What 
thoughts have been generated by it! What 
memories cluster about it! What aspirations 
kindle, what hopes glow, what loves abide, what 
fellowships comfort, what inspirations gird, 
what songs awaken, all as perpetual dividends 
from the Church of God! Come up, men and 


THE CHURCH AN OPPORTUNITY 149 


women, come up to the house of the Lord. Some 
of you, if you would but turn your outstanding 
success to the church now, could most materially 
assist in guiding this transitional period of his¬ 
tory around to the right. I covet you for the 
church. It needs you now. When I turn my 
eyes back to read the trying story of much the 
church has had to pass through, I do profoundly 
thank God for the faithful souls who have never 
failed. I appeal to you to-day that you shall 
help make possible a to-morrow that will look 
back as proudly upon you. Jesus Christ stands 
close to the crisis of this hour, and with divine 
appreciation of what it means to the whole his¬ 
tory of the world when it shall at last be written, 
earnestly invites you to invest your whole life 
here. And in his great name in the daring cause 
to which he so perfectly gave himself, I urge 
now your acceptance. 

“Passionately fierce, the voice of God is pleading, 

Pleading with men to arm them for the fight. 

See how those hands, majestically bleeding. 

Call us to rout the armies of the night; 

Not to the work of sordid, selfish saving 

Of our own souls, to dwell with him on high, 

But to the soldier’s splendid selfless braving, 

Eager to fight for righteousness, and to die. 

Bread of thy Body, give me for my fighting; 

Give me to drink thy sacred blood for wine; 

While there are wrongs that need me for the righting. 
While there is warfare, splendid and divine.” 


IX 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 

“No man putteth a piece of new garment upon an old; 
if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the 
piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the 
old.”—Luke 5. 36. 

The Jews were sticklers for the old forms. 
There was a genuine sanctity to them in the way 
in which their fathers had done things. That 
which had come out of a long past carried the 
flavor of an acceptability which needed no apol¬ 
ogy nor was compelled to appeal to an argument. 
The dignity of mere age was a genuine dignity. 
There is a sense in which the fight of progress 
has always been set against the worship of the 
past. Every improvement has had to carry the 
handicap of prejudice for the old, in its appeal 
for ascendency. Christianity met this fact in its 
most outstanding embodiment when it first asked 
for world attention. In every least departure 
from the old forms the Jews made bold to point 
out the danger of the new religious organiza¬ 
tion. They saw that the disciples of Jesus had 
ceased to conform to all the rites and cere¬ 
monies they had received across sacred centuries, 
and at once went to Jesus with keen inquiry as 
150 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 151 


to the reason. The Master received them, and 
answered them with two very keen and signifi¬ 
cant parables, that carried the argument. He 
well knew which would be treasured down long 
centuries yet to be, as the ever-changing forms 
of a continuous and growing truth should find 
the attendant difficulties of an advancing civili¬ 
zation, unable to be met by the methods of a 
lesser yesterday. The religion that is to reach 
this advancing world of ours must not be sta¬ 
tionary in its forms and expressions. Jesus an¬ 
swered these inquiring Jews quickly with two 
statements framed in the form of stories, saying, 
“We don’t use new cloth to patch an old garment, 
nor do we put new wine in old bottles.” Both 
parables carried in their real meaning far more 
than they merely said, and Jesus was content to 
set them down the centuries to interpret anew 
to every age the same truth which has always 
seemed a difficult truth through which to see the 
application of religion. He meant to say to 
those inquiring Jews then that the old garment 
of Judaism was worn past mending, and must 
therefore be replaced; and the old bottles of 
Judaism were empty, and being so, carried no 
promise in such emptiness to a thirsty world, 
for old bottles (wine skins) could not be filled 
again, being exhausted in their strength. Chris¬ 
tianity was a new principle for life, and needed 
a new form for men to behold. Jesus was mak- 


152 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


ing clear, with these homely figures, the fact that 
religion to continue effective must be adapted to 
the day in which it is to work. 

Conditions are ever new, and the religion that 
saves man must fit mankind. I stopped recently 
to look in wondering interest at the first loco¬ 
motive and rail carriages ever used in our coun¬ 
try. They had been hoisted upon a platform, 
under the high hung roof of a monster terminal 
of a great railroad of to-day. We who had just 
journeyed hundreds of miles in all the comforts 
and speed of the modern railroad, could scarce 
believe that those crude toy-looking things were 
the railroad equipment of yesterday. But the 
great trains we know to-day are the eloquent 
declaration of the progressive principle of an 
ever-changing adaptation of steam transporta¬ 
tion. The church of the twentieth century can¬ 
not do its work in the garb of the seventeenth 
century, nor of any other century. If civiliza¬ 
tion and the life of the people shall advance into 
ever-new and changing conditions, the Church 
of Jesus Christ, which is set for the salvation of 
those men and women, cannot remain in the 
ancient forms and meet its responsibility. 

I have heard folks who imagined they had 
discovered a great spiritual decline because of a 
change of outward methods offer severe criticism 
because the old camp meeting has passed away. 
It was the jideal ministry of real spiritual en- 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 153 


deavor. The camp meeting was effective because 
it was the only way a protracted meeting could 
then be conducted. Settlements were scattered. 
Transportation was poor. There is no piety in a 
tent. There is no assurance of religious en¬ 
vironment when we are seated on rough boards 
under canvas coverings. Folks to-day who seek 
to revive again the fervor and the victories of 
the camp meeting find the religious purpose is 
violated because the whole thing is done in the 
spirit of an outing and a picnic. All this does 
not mean that we cannot have a changed and 
better form of meeting more adapted to our day. 
We want a service of religion that will fit the 
life of to-day. The religion of Jesus Christ will 
never be outrun by any generation. It has been 
designed for the salvation of humanity, just as 
humanity is or ever shall be. Christianity was 
not designed to fit a human problem after it had 
been worked into a certain degree of worthiness 
and readiness. God matched his plan against 
humanity, and no changing civilizations or cus¬ 
toms that man shall ever devise or evolve will 
place an uncrossable barrier between the gospel 
and its task. There is a divine right, and a 
divine intent too, in the adaptation of Christian¬ 
ity to whatever any age shall be able to present. 
That means in no manner that the genuine vital¬ 
ity of our religion shall be changed. 

There is a great difference between adaptation 


154 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


for effectiveness and surrender of principle. 
Because we shall discover a more perfectly de¬ 
vised administration of the gospel from time to 
time to the real problem of human life is no 
ground for accusation that the gospel has been 
changed. When I was a boy the taking of qui¬ 
nine was a common home experience, and to 
more effectually accomplish the dose, my some¬ 
what inventive mother devised the splendid plan 
of putting the quinine in a spoonful of sorghum. 
It never helped the sorghum any, but it surely 
did make the quinine more easily applied. Since 
that we have learned how to encase the same 
essential in capsules or chocolate coated tablets. 
The quinine is not changed, but has certainly 
been more effectually adapted to its ministry. 
The great high standards of truth and holiness 
which characterize Christianity cannot change. 
They must remain forever. They deal with the 
eternal fundamentals. They must remain for 
kings or paupers, for ancients or moderns, for 
wise or ignorant. But how to apply them to the 
particular type of every age is the ever-new 
problem in application of the church. The Jew 
placed confidence in form. The way a thing 
religious was done, he counted of prime impor¬ 
tance. The same judgment has caused much 
difficulty in administration of church endeavor 
ever since. Whoso would change the form of 
our religion is an enemy of the church. We have 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 155 


suffered much shallow criticism springing from 
that thin soil. 

“Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul. 

As the swift seasons roll 
Leave thy low-vaulted past; 

Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast. 

Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine outgrown shell. 

By life’s unresting sea.” 

The poet has caught the measure of life there. 
The only unchanging, set thing we know is death. 
Life must forever come on into its new-made 
temple to discover above it a vaster dome than 
yesterday could know. “What are we here for 
but to grow?” 

There was a time, and not far gone is it yet, 
when a man’s life was horizoned in a little 
neighborhood. That neighborhood was cramped 
into the short range of slow horses and buggies. 
The church could not write a far-flung program. 
But conditions changed, and the neighborhood 
horizon was pushed back till it horizoned a 
state, then a nation, and to-day no man is 
abreast his time who fails to catch step every 
morning with the ways and needs and plans of 
a world. The church form and work must not 
falter. In fact, it must lead. Mankind is not 
supposed to go exploring for a place up to which 
it will be safe to bring the church. Christianity 


156 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


must stand forever before our race with un¬ 
erring finger pointing out and saying, “This is 
the way; walk ye in it” The little church at 
Pinnybog must have new r s of China, and that 
Michigan bog is not the bog it ought to be un¬ 
less the pulse of China’s pressing need be felt by 
its people. Who ever made Pinnybog to be a 
refuge, to which to flee from the wwld need? 
The question they, w T ith us all, should be ask¬ 
ing is, How r near do w r e now 7 ' come to being the 
church we should be? In seeking answer to that 
question I shall make two observations. 

First. The adapted church will be evident by 
its fruits in the life about it. This is the most 
practically tested day the w T orld has ever know n. 
Some of the most skillful men in the great fac¬ 
tories are paid high w r ages just to devise severe 
testing trials, in order to discover every con¬ 
cealed flaw r that may have passed the less care¬ 
ful eye of the ordinary workman. I saw r an 
automobile, driven by one of the officials of a 
large automobile factory, which had been made 
entirely from rejected parts. It was made and 
used as a convincing sample of how rigid the 
tests for high quality were in that factory. Great 
business advances thus. If it becomes lax in the 
test, the cars come back to the factory wdth dis¬ 
pleased customers to announce them. The fac¬ 
tory knows it is much easier to find a faulty 
gear while it is passing from the ovens to its 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 157 


hardening, than to have the whole disabled car 
sent back for repair. 

Every idea submitted to the world must meet 
that same fact. Our religion is tested by the 
life it produces. Thoughtful and far-seeing men 
in our country and world to-day believe, and are 
speaking their belief boldly, that we need a gen¬ 
uine revival of simple moral imperative more 
than we need anything else. Men who are sound¬ 
ing deep into the industrial and business situa¬ 
tion are not uncertain in their testimony to this 
point. The absorbing struggle among us to-day 
for material prosperity has crowded the Ten 
Commandments to the wall. John Ruskin, who 
w rote in sarcasm to his day, dared to rewrite the 
Commandments, and they can be read with even 
more meaning by this day than by his. “Thou 
shalt have gods of ease and comfort before Me. 
Thou shalt worship thine ow r n imaginations as 
to houses and goods and business, and shalt bow 
down and serve them. Thou shall remember the 
Sabbath Day, to make sure that all its hours are 
given to sloth and lounging and stuffing the body 
with rich foods, leaving the children of sorrow 
and ignorance to perish in their sodden misfor¬ 
tune. Thou shalt kill and slay men, by doing as 
little as possible thyself and squeezing as much 
as possible out of others. Thou shalt look upon 
loveliness in womanhood to soil it with impurity. 
Thou shalt steal daily, the employer from the 


158 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


servant, and the servant from his employer, and 
the devil take the hindmost. Thou shalt get 
thy livelihood by weaving a great web of false¬ 
hoods and sheathing thyself in lies. Thou shalt 
covet thy neighbor’s house to possess it for thy¬ 
self! thou shalt covet his office, his farm, his 
goods, his fame, and everything he has. And 
to crown all these practical business laws, the 
Devil has added a new commandment, Thou 
shalt hate thy brother as thou hatest thyself.” 
Such was Ruskin’s bitter sarcasm at his day, 
but he was proclaiming it because he declared 
“there was restlessness in the heart; unhappiness 
in the home; hatred in the task; anarchy in the 
street; all of which things lead to chaos, destruc¬ 
tion and death.” 

Such things most truly stand pleading before 
this day of ours for appreciation again. Did we 
not know these words were from Ruskin, we 
would think they were from the very last page 
of an appeal for this day. Just recently the 
great Premier of Britain called a council of 
ministers to dine with him in Downing Street. 
After grace had been said Mr. Lloyd George 
arose to address the gathered guests with the 
proposition which had prompted his calling them 
together. He declared, as a statesman charged 
with the most difficult task any premier of 
Britain has ever had to face, that it was neces¬ 
sary for the churches to stimulate a spiritual 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 159 


revival if the material conditions of the nation 
were to be improved. After a most brilliant 
tracing of the conspiring causes of the failures 
of past nations, he turned to his main thesis, 
which was that England needed a revival of 
religion more than anything else. Many years 
ago Plato pointed out the very same fact before 
the tottering state. The church must be adapted 
to the times. There was a day when religion 
was supposed to function when a priest per¬ 
formed services before the people. The priestly 
service was rendered not by, but for the people; 
not in any manner to them, but in their behalf. 
Religious service in the terms of the priesthood 
was an official function. That conception of re¬ 
ligion has passed away. The religion of to-day 
is a religion of life, the embodiment of all the 
principles of the human soul. 

The second consideration I wish now to ob¬ 
serve is that the adapted church must be mission¬ 
ary. I discovered a cult recently in a little coun¬ 
try town which presented a, new phase of reli¬ 
gious claim, so far as I know. Its devotees claimed 
to be super-religious, and proved it by keeping 
all they had. They don’t believe in reading the 
Bible. They don’t believe anyone on earth will 
fail of heaven. They don’t believe in churches. 
They don’t believe in doing anything. They are 
pure Don’t Believers. You would think, if the 
frequent objections we hear to the strenuous 


160 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


appeals of the burdened church of to-day were 
correct, that a crowd of joiners would be seeking 
that cult. But it is not so. Folks don’t join the 
church that has no program. The church that 
is vigorous and crowded with interested people 
is the one that is set with all its strength even 
to sacrifice to service. Jesus Christ has a world- 
program. He called live men about him. The 
spirit of the missionary was in our organization, 
and cannot die from our story. Whether we go 
far or stay near, the same spirit must be in us. 
The church simply must be missionary. Every¬ 
where must be the practical evidence that we 
believe the gospel of Jesus Christ will meet and 
satisfy all the needs of mankind. This is a vital 
day to make that claim. There is just now a very 
evident interest in social endeavor shorn of re¬ 
ligious motive. There is need of the clear note 
of Christianity’s claim. The social message that 
leaves that out will fail. I spent the Fourth of 
July in one of our great prisons. It was hot. 
The big open court surrounded by the high walls 
of the prison was shut off from every breeze, and 
offered the streaming sun an unhindered chance 
to spend itself. Twelve hundred men gathered 
for the games. Few ball games I have ever at¬ 
tended had such enthusiasm; Blacks vs. Whites. 
Then they ate pie in contest, and watermelon 
with a splash, and then they marched into 
the big corridors about the cells for a concert 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 161 


and an address. I looked out over that sea of 
upturned faces with strange impressions. They 
crowded tight against the big box on which I 
stood when at my request the restraint which 
discipline always kept over them had been 
relaxed, and they could draw near. I could 
scarce drive my mind away from the tragedies I 
knew were gazing up at me. Pathetic faces, 
tender faces, hardened faces, defiant faces, 
crushed faces, revengeful faces, shame-covered 
faces, but men, men, men, always men. I could 
see over beyond them. After it was all over, 
and I sat without the great doors talking with 
the man who stays down there, I said, “Doesn’t 
it depress you?” Then he told me some of his 
heart-deep experiences. I said: “I couldn’t stay 
in such a place, it would crush my soul.” He 
replied, “Neither could I were it not for the 
fountain.” I asked what fountain he meant. 
He replied, “My Christian experience.” I have 
thought much about that reply ever since. The 
social program, no matter how well planned 
and skillfully laid it may be, will falter and fail 
unless it has behind and within it a deep reli¬ 
gious motive. Lincoln Steffens gave us a remark¬ 
able testimony of that fact at a conclusive point 
of his experience. We need Christianity fitted 
into the troubles of to-day. There is an obliga¬ 
tion attendant upon Christian profession. Its 
ability is its responsibility. The rampant mate- 


162 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


rialism that has almost wrecked our civilization 
calls for some passionate application of the faith 
we hold. It is time the gospel of Jesus were 
given the fair chance its origin and heroic estab¬ 
lishment entitle it to among us. It is not some 
strange and inapplicable thing we are endeavor¬ 
ing to do. Jesus did not come to splice a new 
piece of cloth to an old and wasted garment. He 
came to make strong the well nigh broken 
threads of life, and to weave again into many a 
torn place the strong warp of the renewed pur¬ 
pose. The assurance of such results as our 
religion constantly achieves should set us all 
in enthusiasm in its service. George Eliot was 
sitting before the fireplace engaged in conversa¬ 
tion with a friend one evening. Something shook 
the house, and a rare vase that stood on the 
mantle toppled to fall to the floor. The great 
author saw it, and reaching out quickly caught 
it. As she stood it once more on its place safely, 
she sank back into her chair and said, “Would 
God the day might come when w r e would all 
reach out as unconsciously and enthusiastically 
to save a tottering man or w oman, as we do to 
save a fine vase.” The story has long been a 
w'hip to my all too little endeavor. I am 
ashamed to think back into my life. So little 
have I done. So many opportunities I have not 
accepted. So many shades I might have lifted to 
let in the rays of hope to some who were sitting 


THE CHURCH FOR TO-DAY 163 


in darkness. How many the begging opportu¬ 
nity I have missed to really comfort sorrowing 
women in agony at the graves of their first-born! 
Men, harassed by business cares they have not 
known how to endure, and tossed every whither 
by the fever of their distress I have failed to 
bring our message to. Young men and young 
women fighting with beasts of passion, I have 
not shown the way to deliverance. Trembling 
hearts of those who were passing down into the 
valley where lie the long shadows of sorrow, I 
have failed to comfort and lead. The gospel of 
Jesus Christ was intrusted into our hands with 
an attendant responsibility that demands the 
passion of the missionary. The opportunity of 
service is before us. The call of God is clear in 
our ears. The church of Jesus Christ stands in 
every one of its people for the very best there is 
for men everywhere. 


X 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 

“Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee 
what thou must do.”—Acts 9. 6. 

I like that verse. It has such frank approach 
to the real matter in hand. Never mind now to 
hold a committee meeting about how to reach 
the city, or how to solve the difficulties attendant 
upon work in a city. Get up and go right on into 
the city and you will find out there w T hat you 
should do. Without seeking in this place now 
for the actual matter as related to Saul, who was 
in trouble with his life, and was seeking to find 
some way through his blindness into the deliver¬ 
ance of himself from a wrong career, let us make 
bold to read the instructions as significant and 
showing a way straight into the heart of one of 
our great tasks. I incline to believe the church 
to-day in its difficult position before the city 
problem has perfect right to read this verse 
again as instruction for its conduct. Get into 
the city. Don’t endeavor to find an easy way to 
get out of the city where surviving as an insti¬ 
tution merely designed to survive is easy; but 
164 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 165 


get right into the city, where tasks are hard, 
and where multitudes wait your ministry, and 
there you will be told what to do, and find some 
way to do it. That sounds at least positive 
enough to be interesting. It sounds as though it 
proposed that whatever failure did attend its 
work would be that failure which is joined to 
honest endeavor. I am little concerned about 
mere failure or success as men measure them. I 
am greatly concerned that from me there shall 
have been delivered among men an honest en¬ 
deavor to do what needed doing. 

I would not seem to pose here now as one 
claiming any superior qualifications to propose 
a program for the church in the city. It is not 
my credential in qualification with which I 
come. I am only sure I believe in the church’s 
mission for the city, as a supreme task before it, 
for the reason the people are in the city. The 
Church of Jesus Christ has been set to save the 
people. I have had enough experience in different 
types of city churches to furnish me a point of 
observation from which I believe I can see some 
of the vital principles involved in the problem. 

Every observer of the modern movements of 
society must agree that the tendency, very evi¬ 
dent in our day, is the organization of our whole 
life upon a nonreligious basis. Such a serious 
social fact as that must demand earnest attention 
of those who lay any claim to be the followers of 


166 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


Him who planned and announced the plan of a 
religious redemption of all the world. The re¬ 
organization of society must not be on a nonre¬ 
ligious basis, and the place where the social con¬ 
flict will be settled will be in the great centers 
of population. The church in the city is the most 
important church in the wx>rld, for the simple 
but overwhelming reason that the people are 
there. The importance of any church is its rela¬ 
tionship to the people. There is no hope, nor is 
there any reason to desire that the city church 
should hope, merely to continue to exist because 
it existed in a less strenuous yesterday. There is 
no acceptable plea to make for any type of 
church to continue to exist merely because it did 
one day an effectual service. The business of 
the Church of Jesus Christ can never be done on 
this earth by a merely existing church, nor by a 
church to which the matter of existing is in any 
manner a concern. We were not established to 
exist. The church in itself is not an end; it is 
distinctly a means. Its profession as being the 
divine institution of our Lord justifies the un¬ 
compromising expectation of the world in which 
it has been established that it shall actually 
succeed not merely in keeping alive, but in mak¬ 
ing regnant its religious ideals everywhere. 
There is no alternative before Christianity other 
than universal triumph or universal collapse. 

Prince Bismarck early achieved a notoriety, of 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 167 


one kind at least, by declaring that great cities 
were sores on the body politic; which liability 
he proposed to remove by annihilating the cities. 
The treatment was, however, not only too vio¬ 
lent, it was impossible. Some one suggested 
that his cure was the same as a proposition to 
cure a case of headache by cutting off the head. 
We need not endeavor to escape the fact of the 
great city. We will not scatter it. We will 
never make a farm of Manhattan Island, nor 
grow potatoes along Woodward Avenue. “Back 
to the country” sounds good, and makes a good 
sign for the sale of subdivisions, but it will never 
solve the problem of the city. We are bound to 
have the cities. Our hope is not to be found in 
working them out, but, rather, is to be worked 
out in them. With all the danger-cries that have 
been started about the cities, our civilization is 
not scared about them. Every municipality feels 
the pulse of its own life in a satisfaction founded 
on a constant and increasing growth. We throw 
enthusiasm into the pursuit of numbers, and 
eagerly on census years seek out every available 
human to establish our position. We are not 
afraid of the city. We long to pile figures of 
great cities. Our problem is to make them good 
cities. The mere matter of numbers is not in 
itself a problem, other than of feeding and sani¬ 
tation. But the congested districts in our clus¬ 
tered population-centers present to us the most 


168 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


characteristic product of our new civilization, 
and keep liable ever the spreading of undesir¬ 
able things, diseases or ideas, which may in any 
one member become easily contagious to the 
whole mass. Xo other nation has ever been sub¬ 
jected to the city problem in the manner it is 
now presented in America. Our serious problem 
of immigration brings added liability to the city 
in our country. The simple crowding together 
of the native folk of a nation offers chance for 
vice and corruption. There are serious slum 
problems in London and Glasgow and Paris and 
Rome. But they are native problems. They do 
not carry peril to their nations as do the con¬ 
gestions of cosmopolitan citizenship in American 
cities. We face the serious fact of multitudes 
of people coming from every quarter of the globe 
without any sense of our national ideas or insti¬ 
tutions. The problem of our cities is being 
shouted at us in such a babel of tongues that 
were it not for the universal sense of need we 
feel, we would not understand them. But the 
common distress of life may cry with an un¬ 
known tongue, and we will understand it. We 
know what the city calls for, and we know that 
the Church of Christ in America has world-op¬ 
portunity in its cities. The city faced by us to¬ 
day demands consecrated earnestness that runs 
straight into sacrifice, but sacrifice was never 
considered an excuse in Christian conduct; it 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 169 


has always been a characteristic. Dr. Scudder, 
in a thoughtful chapter a few years ago, had a 
contention, based upon the fact that the agen¬ 
cies that were producing cities carried also a 
sure tendency to a materialism which would up¬ 
root the spiritual elements in society, as it built 
high the material characteristic. He made this 
statement, which has clung to my memory ever 
since hearing it, “The home and the church, the 
two great moral institutions of society, are three 
times as weak in the city as in the country, and 
growing weaker rather than stronger.” I do not 
know how he arrived at his proportions, but I 
am not inclined to dispute so grave a statement 
on mere figures of proportion. There is no doubt 
that the great city, wherein is made evident the 
only strata of society we are troubled with; 
where poverty and wealth are each congested, 
thus beholding each other as though social dis¬ 
tinguishing facts; where evils are easily en¬ 
trenched; where fascinating pleasures, which 
are set to cater to pure selfishness, are openly 
exposed; where the strangeness attendant upon 
multitude seems to loose the moral restraint; the 
great city if left to itself will prove our swift 
destruction. But I am sure also I can match the 
liability with the hope that that same city, with 
its gathered energy and resources and possibility 
of cooperation, can, if saved, become the great 
modern center of power in righteousness. That 


170 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


is the challenge and the opportunity before the 
church for the city. 

The outstanding problem of home missions 
used to be in outlying unchurched territory. It 
has now become the problem of unchurched 
populations. The Church of Jesus Christ must 
get into this task. There is no greater challenge 
to the Christianity of this hour than the chal¬ 
lenge to keep live spiritual centers of Christian 
contact in the midst of the cities. The very 
things that demand the presence of the church 
there most are likewise the things that make it 
hard for the church to live there. All that, how¬ 
ever, should but serve to make us who call our¬ 
selves Christian more enthusiastic to keep the 
church healthy there. Difficulty is no excuse for 
abandonment. The city’s need must be the ap¬ 
peal that will keep our altars of worship there. 
We will not have met our obligation by opening 
a mission and building an altar where the city 
can go if it will. We must get into the very 
heart of the city’s need, and kneel there and 
pray with the city. 

The only way the great crowding host of men 
and women and children who make up the city 
shall ever be made beautiful is by having among 
them and with them those who by the power of 
God can both defy and delight in the city. It 
can only be defied by the soul who has resources 
outside of it all, and it cannot be delighted in, 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 171 


nor helped, save by the soul who has resources 
inside the crowd, who, in fact, is one of them. 
The city, with its own keen sorrows and con¬ 
gested sins, has come to-day to expect something 
from the church. That attitude is both compli¬ 
ment and crisis to the church. The beckon of 
the city is that we shall now, haying proven our 
ability to work out for ourselves a place among 
the world’s institutions, prove likewise our 
heaven-high relationship by the ministry we 
shall perform, and meet it at its hard places. 
We are ashamed of a retiring church. We 
must have an advancing church. The trium¬ 
phant stride, necessary to the church that 
marches to the salvation of the world, will never 
catch step to the faint bugle-call of mere sur¬ 
vival. We are bound to thrive in the most needy 
situations. God means that the great city shall 
be reached and regenerated. Attendant difficul¬ 
ties are nothing to plead, by an institution whose 
profession and creed link it to omnipotence. 
Need is our appeal. There can be no refusal 
from the Church of God to the extended hand 
of real need. 

I shall never be able to erase from the retina 
of my memory the miserable leper beggars sit¬ 
ting along the roadside outside Jerusalem over 
beside Gethsemane and the Virgin’s Tomb. I 
had grown callous to beggars. The ordinary ap¬ 
peal of a beggar’s outstretched hand had lost its 


172 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


influence upon me because it had become so con¬ 
stant. I could pass beggars in the streets and 
forget them. But those poor lepers I could 
not pass. How compelling their cry! What 
wretchedness in their rags! What undeniable 
appeal in their outstretched arms! Fingers 
gone, palms gone, mere stubs of arms held out 
by some. Tin buckets sitting before them to 
catch the offered alms. I could not pass them 
by. “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” were 
the heroic words with which our Master identi¬ 
fied himself with all his divine powers to the 
very sentiment of human need. We who follow 
him cannot avoid his conclusion. The cry of the 
great city cannot fail to awaken our consecra¬ 
tion. The finger of duty points straight: “Go 
into the city and it shall be told thee what thou 
must do.” Told thee there: Get to the place of 
your service and vour orders will meet you there. 
That is a new order in religious service. This is 
a new sense of the expectant communion with 
God. The ancient ideal had been to get into the 
solitude of lonely places, and there, with all the 
noise of the world shut out, listen for God. Here 
is a new word. Here is an order that breaks 
with the past. Get into the stir and whirl of 
the city, and listen there. The Christian Com¬ 
mission restates religion. 

The first problem of Christian life is to enter 
actually into the very condition in which earth’s 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 173 


millions must live, and discover right there the 
message of God’s ministry. There have only 
been thus far found two ways in which religion 
can regard itself toward the world. There was 
only known one way until Christ came. The old 
effort of religion was to save itself by avoiding 
the world. The new way is to save the world 
through yourself. It is a coward’s plan to desert 
the world because it is unclean. It is a Chris¬ 
tian’s crusade to make the world clean because 
the world’s conqueror has come. Get into the 
city and listen for God, there where life battles 
tumultuous and strenuous! There where streets 
are crowded with men and women! There where 
love, and hate, and discord, and harmony, and 
rivalry, and jealousy, and life, and death are; get 
right there and listen! That word has the com¬ 
mand of the Christ back of it who had then died 
and risen from the dead in order to get to man¬ 
kind the message of salvation. He who had wept 
over the city, he who knew the tragedy of the 
crowd, he who could not stay on the mountain 
top, even in communion with heaven, while the 
multitude in need stretched out appealing 
hands. This is new! This is Christian. Get 
into the city. You will meet God there, because 
men and women and children are there, and they 
are God’s chief concern on this earth. The 
cloister was a hideous mistake. It must never 
again have an emphasis as a Christian program. 


174 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


We must plant ourselves in the very midst of the 
most needy situations of the world and not only 
exist but prosper there. 

I have a profound conviction that God has 
arranged a divine balance in human equipment, 
a balance to be proven and justified in a regen¬ 
erated whole race of mankind. Man has in him¬ 
self sufficient energy to unitedly bring success 
to all. To me there is no finer call of the gospel 
than this, that the superabundance of ability in 
some and the handicap in others can be made to 
unite in hope for all. The serious situation with 
our day, however, is that the strong by their very 
strength are becoming affiliated. We have made 
most of our discussions of the problem of our 
cities around the things caused by the conges¬ 
tion of misery. The wretchedness of human life 
forced into the seething caldron of our city slums 
is surely a crying condition which needs help. 
I incline to believe, however, when we think 
straight into this we will agree that we have been 
putting undue emphasis upon what, under pres¬ 
ent-day customs, has become a compulsion; and 
you cannot cure troubles by dealing with result¬ 
ant elements of those troubles. We discuss the 
slum with solemn conclusions that it is a dan¬ 
gerous environment in which to grow human 
life. Every inhabitant of the slum will agree. 
They need no argument. The condemnation is 
axiomatic. The folks who make the condition 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 175 


deplore it as much as those who inquire into it. 
The slum is a double-faced problem. The suburb 
is just as much a problem as is the slum. The 
problem disclosed in the slum must be considered 
from the standpoint of the suburb if you would 
get the honest view. The congestion of enlight¬ 
enment is as serious a problem to the whole 
situation as is the congestion of misery. The 
task of the church is to save mankind. The extra 
strength of the world, which because of its 
abundant endowment, or by the mere chance of 
some good fortune, has a margin of privilege, is 
to-day sadly withdrawing itself from the needy 
situations of the world. The strength for the 
evangelization of the slum is to-day reposing in 
the splendid equipment of the suburb. The 
suburb is voluntary; the slum is compulsory. 
The strength which made possible the flight into 
the suburb must likewise carry there the respon¬ 
sibility toward those who could not escape, and 
so by handicap of ability are left to constitute 
the slum. The cry of the great city to-day is 
tuned at that very contradiction. The slum can¬ 
not lift itself out of its distress. The underman 
cannot rouse himself and shake off the burden 
of his handicap. There is too much on him. He 
must do his best and I have faith to believe he 
will. I am not asking that his own burden shall 
be borne by anyone else. It is good to let him 
carry his own responsibility. 


176 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


I remember a few years ago the owner of a 
tall building found his nearest neighbor, a little 
one-story saloon building, coughing smoke and 
gas up against the big overtopping neighbor. 
The big building instituted suit and won the 
case compelling his neighbor to build an eigh¬ 
teen story smoke-stack on his little one-story 
head just to recognize his obligation to those 
above him. I am not advocating that the small 
and the weak shall not carry their own obliga¬ 
tion. I believe they will do that. The under 
man surely thus far in this world has borne his 
share. But because he is the under man he can 
no more than furnish the margin on which he 
shall be rescued. Goethe once wrote this 
strangely egotistical and self-sure word: “The 
man who has life in him feels himself to be here 
for his own sake and not for the public.” It was 
one of Goethe’s not too rare heathen spots made 
manifest. It has been refuted many eloquent 
times. Personal issues must be swallowed up in 
a sense of something greater. Every man and 
woman must came to appreciate that position 
within a farther-flung horizon than self. No one 
is big enough to furnish bounds for his own en¬ 
deavors. The evangelization of the slum is 
bound inseparably to the suburb. The extra 
strength which makes a foremost possible must 
be added to the handicap which makes a hind¬ 
most imperative; and together they will both win. 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 177 


I saw a college footrace. It was a handicap. 
It interested me very much because the best run¬ 
ner started behind for the good reason that he 
was the best runner. The poorest runner was 
out in front to start. It was a new version for 
service. “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” 
were the divinely heroic words voicing for Jesus 
that sentiment perfected to the life about and 
ahead of him. The command of God is sounding 
in and back of this cry of the city, and says in 
unmistakable words, “Let the strong bear the 
burden of the weak.” The voice of the city is 
not a mere roar and grind of wheels and shafts 
and machinery. That voice is intoned in the 
sorrow of human hearts. It has in it the stir¬ 
ring appeal of tastes, and powers, and joys, and 
hopes, and virtues, and sins—all those familiar 
things of our own hearts. Jesus never failed to 
detect them. He unraveled the composite cry 
of the streets into the pleas of individuals. His 
great heart was ever for them. He gave himself 
for their sakes. O God, hear the cry of our city! 
Have done the prayer. We have prayed thus too 
long. God does hear that cry. God help me to 
appreciate the cry that has arisen to a very roar 
in my ears to-day. In the city we must discern 
what now God has to say to us here. The church 
must meet the situation. The salvation of the 
so-called upper class will be found in its evan¬ 
gelization of the under class, if the variant alti- 


178 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


tude can be detected. You who have strength 
enough to absolutely eliminate the problem of 
making a living, know you your strength is 
needed in supplement, for vast numbers are 
daily actually utterly done out in the hard fight 
to keep the wolf from the door. There are times 
when I am blinded with my own tears and sick¬ 
ened with the touch of the misery of our troubled, 
crowding life. The city is jammed with sorrow 
and need, and holding it all square before my 
face, and tight to my interest. There come times 
of tense heartache to me. The sins of men rise so 
menacingly that the reform of the world seems 
well-nigh hopeless. I have many, many times 
gone from my sacred pulpit back to my study, 
and have seen the tiny efforts of my little feeble 
ministry fail and disappear like the bubbles I 
used to blow and start away looking so splendid, 
reflecting all about them on their bright faces, 
only to snap out to leave absolutely nothing where 
they were. O my God, I have cried, what a task is 
this to which I am set! I am in the city! I wait 
thy word! Speak! Speak, Lord, that I may know 
what and how I ought here to do thy will for 
the city! I lift my eyes away from my own 
feebleness. To look at my little hand, and head, 
and heart were discouragement complete. I 
would open my ear to thy word, and my eye to 
thy presence. It is God’s personal presence that 
puts courage into my soul. I even grow confi- 


THE CHURCH FOR THE CITY 179 


dent with him, I am ready to make boast. The 
city’s cry will be heard, and the city will be 
saved when God’s church will get earnestly into 
the city and there do God’s will. 

“The greatest church in all the land. 

With wealth and power in its control, 

Holds naught but ashes in its hand. 

Unless it guards the city’s soul. 

What means this stately granite pile. 

To Christian worship set apart. 

If crowded streets, mile after mile. 

Feel not the throbbing of its heart? 

“Respond! O Church! these myriad calls. 
Appealing, come from street and mart. 

Where every man whom sin enthralls 
Expects a welcome to thy heart. 

Reach out, O Church! this is the hour 
To make thy ministry complete! 

God waits, to furnish thee the power. 

To lift the city to his feet.” 


XI 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 

“And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him 
in the midst of them.”—Matthew 18. 2. 

The challenge of childhood stands squarely 
before the church that engages itself to save the 
world. There is no more opportune challenge 
before us, and yet a challenge to which a great 
percentage of our people are seemingly indiffer¬ 
ent. I make such a statement founded upon an 
experience in the regular work of the pastorate, 
in charges ranging from the country school- 
house, as the neighborhood meeting place, to the 
strenuous program of the city church. It is a 
pitiably small percentage of the church people 
who appreciate even in a small degree the cru¬ 
cial issue which is strung before us in our ac¬ 
cessible childhood. The eternal responsibility 
devolving upon us as a church to-day, for the 
molding of our own childhood, and the child¬ 
hood within our easy reach, is the most funda¬ 
mentally constructive fact that presents itself 
to us, if we would transform to righteousness 
this sin-broken world. We can never save a 
world by the hard, slow work of reclamation. 

180 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 181 


We must save it by spiritual cultivation which 
will root itself in youth. We are wearied often 
these days by the continuous presentation of 
problems. We have had so many problems 
brought to our attention that we no longer are 
startled by them. But of one thing have I be¬ 
come thoroughly convinced. In the abundance of 
the discovered things that are wrong, and the 
serious problems presented in finding out ways 
to combat them, everywhere they have served to 
center the keenest attention of those who love 
and aspire for the world’s upcome upon the 
foundational issue in childhood. Every great 
social and religious problem ultimately returns 
to the child for its solution. That statement will 
not meet much, if any, dispute, and yet it is no 
more than a mere passive conviction among us, 
and does not yet inspire a united campaign to 
capture and save the children. 

A few years ago there was a quite well adver¬ 
tised interest about the world of a doctor who 
claimed to have discovered a cure for tubercu¬ 
losis. He was a German physician, and at once, 
because of his scientific standing, his claim was 
given scientific care in observation, and he was 
assigned a special company of children for his 
experiments. They announced at once that if 
the doctor’s method was correct, and his treat¬ 
ment successful, there was no reason why tuber¬ 
culosis should not be absolutely stamped out in 


182 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


one generation. Treat the children, they said. 
How keen the scientific conclusion! The name 
of that physician will not now be known to 
many who read these words, and is remembered 
by me only because I clipped the accounts with 
mere watchful interest, which would have be¬ 
come world knowledge to-day if the plan had 
succeeded. They tested it on childhood. How 
eloquent that scientific method for the church! 
We are in reach of success when we accept the 
challenge. We cannot go into the mature situa¬ 
tions and work out there a complete social evolu¬ 
tion from the rugged already set characters of 
men and women; though we have thus far in our 
endeavors spent the overwhelming amount of 
our enthusiasm and endeavor in that line; but 
the children can be molded. The fierce and oft 
forbidding problems of immigration to our coun¬ 
try never will be handled successfully by spend¬ 
ing our energy on the adult immigrants, who 
come emerging out of century-molded condi¬ 
tions which have set their lines and ways and 
prejudices in their characters, and dictated their 
judgments and thoughts from childhood. The 
only hope this to-day badly troubled nation of 
ours can see, before the problem of our pouring 
immigration, is in the childhood thus brought, 
and made opportune to us to mold to our new 
ways and win to our new ideals. The rescue 
work in mission halls on the Boweries of our 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 183 


great cities presents a constant challenge of 
evangelistic interest. They pull out of the slough 
of sin and vice a few remarkable and hope-inspir¬ 
ing cases. But they cannot save the cities. The 
slough of evil will fill up faster than rescuers 
can pull the victims out. I favor the mission 
work, I am always glad to lend every possible 
help I can to the interesting endeavor. But it is 
salvage; it is not remedial. The real task is to 
defend the little ones from the liability of the 
slough of the slum, and to drain that slough. 
Until the Church of Jesus Christ turns its vigor¬ 
ous attention to methods constructive, with child¬ 
hood as its objective, our cities w T ill become an 
ever-increasing menace to our nation and to the 
whole civilization of which we are a part. 

There are a great many things which carry 
alarm for the student of conditions as they are 
in society to-day. He who seeks startling human 
facts will not have far to go. But the most signifi¬ 
cant startle I have felt in any news I have read 
for a long time came to me recently with a report 
issued by the Sunday School Board of our 
church. The appalling fact in America to-day to 
me is that eight million of our children are now 
receiving absolutely no religious instruction, 
Protestant or Catholic. One third of our child¬ 
hood is Christless. One third of the generation 
upon which we are to found the hope of to-mor¬ 
row is unapproached for religion. The other two 


184 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


thirds are poorly enough made ready by the 
slight attention religious we give to preserve 
that two-thirds proportion. But one third of 
our children are absolutely religiously aban¬ 
doned. The first and greatest duty of the church 
is to conserve its childhood. One day, according 
to official program, Queen Victoria made a visit 
to one of the larger provincial cities of England 
on an important public function. Among other 
impressive means of showing their appreciation 
of the great queen, the city had organized and 
trained a wonderful choir of four thousand boys 
and girls. They sang the welcome of the city 
w T ith most impressive harmony, and the whole 
occasion was long to be remembered. The next 
morning when Victoria was back in her palace 
she sent a message to the mayor of the city. It 
had no reference to any of the many civic for¬ 
malities and honors that were shown her. It 
went out, rather, as a message straight from the 
nation’s great mother heart: “The Queen wishes 
to know, did the children all get home safely?” 
I know of few things, of all the many impressive 
things the great English queen ever did, that 
made her mean more to me than that. Are the 
children safe? The nation cannot ask a more 
important question. The church cannot help 
answer a more vital appeal. Never was a 
greater challenge made to those who were to try 
to do the work of God on earth than when Jesus 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 185 


took a little child and set him in their midst. If 
the strong and talented men and women of the 
church would but face that challenge as the 
appeal the Sunday school has, and bring them¬ 
selves there to help us answer the challenge, we 
would find ourselves in the midst of the most 
constructive revival the church has ever known. 

It is an overwhelming testimony when we find, 
after careful analysis, that eighty-two per cent 
of the church membership to-day came in 
through the doors of our Sunday schools. That 
should put enthusiasm into the heart of every 
worker there. There is, however, attendant 
blame, and severe charge to lay against us, when 
we find more, that only a scant fifteen per cent 
of the pupils of our Sunday schools ever unite 
with the church. Eighty-two per cent of what 
we now have came from but fifteen per cent of 
the schools where the children were within our 
reach. If we will save the loss of that eighty- 
five per cent of our Sunday schools, we would 
increase our churches four hundred and sixty- 
seven per cent—an increase quite within reason. 
The care we are now taking of the great problem 
of human construction is no more ultimately 
hopeful than the tactics of the good Samaritan 
as a policy to eliminate the danger on the Jeri¬ 
cho road. I do not fail to appreciate the fine 
ministry and pity and benevolent service of the 
Samaritan. I favor every bit of it too. But it 


186 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


is not constructive. In fact, it is an enabling 
policy. If nothing more be done than the rescue 
and care for victims, no matter how tenderly it 
be done, it would but clear the road of fatal 
evidence of robbery and cruelty, and make the 
continued work of the robbers more easy. I 
would not minimize in the least the fine work 
being done by our public schools. May God bless 
our great free schools. But our radical swing 
to unlicensed liberty has hushed the voice of the 
majority in our republic as to religion. The 
minority sit regnant, and boastfully so, in the 
fact that we dare not in the schools we have 
founded and support lift our voices in religion. 
Hence we turn to the church in its own direct 
activity for response. When we enter this realm 
of training in the moral and religious fiber of 
life, we are confronted with the fact that we are 
doing what we alone can do in a sadly imperfect 
way. The criticism attendant upon such a fact 
must not be put upon those who are doing what 
we are doing. They do not claim they are doing 
what should be done. They are only doing the 
best they can. The great company of strong 
men and women of our churches who have never 
felt the first sense of obligation upon them for 
this work, must accept a great share of the blame. 
The very most important matter before us all 
just now is the fixing of the great principles of 
righteousness and religion in these forming 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 187 


characters of our children. I wish somehow the 
great values involved could be disclosed to all 
our appreciation. If we but knew the truth that 
is now within impressive reach of our religious 
interest, we doubtless would bestir ourselves. 
Old John Trebonious always appeared before the 
boys in his class with uncovered head. He kept 
within himself as their teacher an evident sense 
of awe. It was impressive, for he stood as in 
the presence of to-morrow when to-morrow was 
impressionable. He used to say: “Who can tell 
what may yet rise up among these youths? 
There may be among them those who shall be¬ 
come learned doctors, sage legislators, nay, 
princes of the empire.” And even as he spoke 
thus, there sat before him in that little class 
that then unnoticed boy w T ho was to become a 
character to shake the world, for John Trebo¬ 
nious was even then teaching Martin Luther. 
There would be great reverence of conduct if we 
could but see what is before us in the childhood 
we have been intrusted to impress. Instead of 
our being anxious that they should show us 
honor as their seniors, we would stand in awe 
before those upon whom a greater to-morrow 
shall rest. If we could but behold as now ac¬ 
complished the w T reck and havoc some of the 
boys and girls will make of life to-morrow be¬ 
cause we have not been true to the opportune 
hour we were risked with before them, there 


188 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


might now be stirred in some of you a passionate 
endeavor to secure yourselves against the caustic 
blame a failing to-morrow will launch against 
you if you fail. 

There was a most bitter indictment of society 
hurled from the sharp pen of a young fifteen- 
year-old girl from out one of the prison places of 
our own State not long since. Her letter was 
broadcasted over this country through our 
papers and made us all cringe as we read it. 
This keen and convicting charge was in the 
epistle: “You have made me what I am. I have 
learned evil in your Juvenile Detention Home. 
I learned more with worse girls in the House of 
the Good Shepherd. The Girls’ Reform School 
taught me new evils, and then the Canfield Ave¬ 
nue Station, where I was penned with a nest of 
dope fiends, taught me the dope habit. You have 
made me what I am.” Such an indictment our 
city and system sits before. There is an intelli¬ 
gence and an energy and a real personality in 
that young accuser. Had those elements but 
have been won and directed into use instead of 
sin, she would doubtless have been a useful and 
constructive force for righteousness. One of 
our newspapers made the accusation of the girl 
the basis of an editorial to say that the “Deten¬ 
tion Home, the Institution for Wayward Girls, 
the County jail, and the State prison were with¬ 
out any dispute the greatest institutions we have 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 189 


for the making of confirmed criminals, more 
effective even than our streets. We do not solve 
the problem, we are merely stating it.” I am not 
now to argue the matter thus stated by our 
editor, but I do want to emphasize the conclusion 
which he brought after a lengthy editorial in 
the tone of the paragraph I quoted. He con¬ 
cluded with this word, “The boys and girls of 
this community must be saved before they get 
to those institutions.” 

A few years ago in the city where I then 
resided occurred one of the most shocking 
crimes it has ever been mine to be a close observer 
of. Two young lads, after a most spectacular 
robbery, killed a citizen and a policeman, and 
made their escape, only to be captured later, and 
brought to most tragic conviction. They were 
sent to the state prison, one for life, which was 
a short sentence, for he died soon, and the other 
for a long term of years. The lad who lived 
into his sentence was a remarkable boy, and was 
reached by one of my close friends in religious 
interest and became an interesting correspond¬ 
ent of his. I want to quote you a portion of a 
letter he wrote one day, and which letter I have 
always counted as among the most remarkable 
letters I have ever read. After a fine word of 
personal appreciation for my friend’s interest in 
him he said: 

“Reflection in the quiet of my cell here forces 


190 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


out into relief the revelation of how unnatural 
to a human being imprisonment really is. From 
a state of seeming indifference to my crime, 
which the several journals attributed to me after 
my arrest, I have come through a change, till 
now the gravity of my position stands revealed in 
all its frightful nakedness. At times the knowl¬ 
edge of my circumstances and position are op¬ 
pressive. The fact is, that while in school, which 
by the way was conducted excellently, it did not 
enable me to grasp more than a mere superficial 
knowledge of the important part I, even as a 
boy in school, held in the community. It is true 
I was not considered backward nor mentally 
deficient. Furthermore, I had been but recently 
confirmed in the church. Still bearing all this 
in mind, when the crisis came, the instruction I 
had received was not rooted deep enough to sway 
and direct my actions in a laudable course. I do 
not cite this as an indictment of anyone, but the 
cold, hard facts stand out that the education 
gained on the streets, such as it is, glitters and 
attracts, while that of the school and church 
hold no lure for a boy. But now from this van¬ 
tage point of observation I realize and appreciate 
the beauty which lies within the bosom of the 
church, the public school, and, not last nor least, 
my Christian home. The serious proposition 
that life is, is now correctly assessed; the tuition 
came high, but has been used to an advantage, 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 191 


and whenever the opportunity conies to me to 
prove myself, I can say in all sincerity I shall 
not be found wanting.” 

Ever since that letter came into my hands it 
has been influencing my enthusiasm for the 
attractive work the church can do on childhood. 
He makes a cutting statement in the declaration 
that w r e leave the glitter and lure out of our 
religious endeavor. What right have we to make 
righteousness labor thus under handicap? What 
right has the street to a glitter and attraction 
in its prosecution of evil ideals, while we in the 
name of God, seeking to touch the eternal and 
moral elements of the boys and girls, shall permit 
an easy failure for the dull reason we did not 
lure childhood in the way. 

I remember a splendid layman we had some 
years ago in Kansas City. He was one of the 
most determined workers for childhood I have 
ever known. We called him “Fiddling Reed,” 
because he was bound to make his Sunday school 
just as attractive in music as evil could make 
any hall to invite them into. He used to conduct 
a mission Sunday school in one of the congested 
and neglected sections of the city. He had a 
successful school, which was run as a branch 
school of the large one of which he had long been 
superintendent. One Sunday afternoon when he 
appeared for the service there was a character¬ 
istic German band playing catchy, rollicking 


192 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


tunes in the street, in front of the chapel, and 
every one of the scholars of the Sunday school was 
in the interested crowd. The band marched away 
playing a sprightly march, and every scholar 
of that school followed down to a near-by beer 
garden. Reed stood on the deserted doorstep of 
his chapel and said, “I will beat the devil at that 
game if it takes every band in Kansas City.” 
The following Sunday he was there with the 
very best band he could get. They had the 
crowd. He took them all into his chapel, and 
with the band to lead they sang hymns as they 
had never been sung about there before. He 
stayed by that job too, and many a little street 
urchin started from there for manhood and God. 
The devil has no right to the monopoly of the 
glitter and attraction he so frequently uses in 
his work. 

The church is charged with the responsibility 
of the most precious possession in the world. 
If we had all the diamonds and jewels on one 
beam of a scale to weigh against the soul of one 
lad, he would outweigh them all. That is what 
this Bible says in not obscure words. I slept 
one long night with ten thousand dollars in 
cash in bed with me. I would not say I slept. I 
remained in bed. It was the worst bed-fellow I 
ever had. My chief concern was in the hope that 
no one knew I had it. I spent the whole night 
making sure it was still in the bed, and when 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 193 


morning came I got it to its owner as quickly as 
possible. If we tremble in fear over a few thou¬ 
sand dollars, how shall we dare go up to our 
heavenly Father, and the lad be not with us, as 
it is forcefully asked in the Word? Our trouble 
is that we do not appreciate where the real 
values of this world repose. There came into my 
hands recently a remarkable report of the Chil¬ 
dren’s Home, of Cincinnati. It was titled “Is It 
Well With the Child?” That society for over 
fifty years has been caring for homeless children, 
and by strictly sanitary and distinctly Christian 
environment has endeavored to save them to 
society. They keep a careful record of all the 
cases they have reared. One after another those 
little waifs, picked up, deserted on doorsteps 
and in public places, have been carefully built 
into noble lives. The general counsel of one of 
the largest railway systems in America was one 
of their boys. The general freight agent of 
another of the largest roads was another. They 
have kept a careful record of five hundred of the 
earlier cases of the home who have gone out into 
the world and have now had a fair chance to 
succeed or fail. Four hundred and eighty-four 
of the five hundred, or ninety-six and eight- 
tenths per cent, have turned out well. That is 
enough to furnish keen interest to the compara¬ 
tive student in heredity and environment. Some 
one in comment on these remarkable results 


194 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


wrote: “I believe in the blood of ancestry; but 
there is also a blood of kindness, a blood of loving 
interest, a blood of unselfish sacrifice; and these 
effectual bloods will tell an inspiring story one 
day of lives purified and purposes strengthened,” 
Surely, the Church of Christ will not fail to see 
the great challenge its Sunday school presents 
it with. It is time we were concentrating our 
greatest interest and expending our most pas¬ 
sionate endeavor on the children. Our people 
are busy building houses for flood and fire to 
destroy; they are absorbed in piling up fortunes 
which will soon be scattered by the greed and 
scramble of those who oft impatiently await 
their death; why not catch the unmeasured op¬ 
portunity offered in the multitude of children 
all about us, and put genuine impress of holy 
interest there by the help of God, that neither 
flood nor fire can harm, and that cannot be dis¬ 
sipated by greed nor wasted by carelessness? 

“You may be Christ or Shakespeare, little child! 

A Saviour or a sun to the lost world. 

There is no babe born but may carry furled 
Strength to make bloom the world’s disastrous wild. 


“Oh what then, must our labor be to mold you ? 

To open the heart, to build with dream the brain. 
To strengthen the young soul in toil and pain. 
Till our age-aching hands no longer hold you. 




THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 195 


“Vision far dreamed! But soft! If your last goal 

Be low; if you are only common clay, 

What then? Toil lost? Were our toil trebled, nay! 
You are a soul, you are a human soul! 

A greater than the skies ten-trillion starred, 
Shakespeare no greater, O you slip of God.” 

How shall any of us ever fail to appreciate 
that? If there is a hope for our day; if there is 
not to come an ultimate wreck of public morals; 
if barbarian lawlessness shall be restrained from 
the destruction of our constitution; if the oncom¬ 
ing hosts of life we see but dimly now in the 
dawn of childhood, are to be defended from the 
debauchery of evil; if sin, clothed in the most 
attractive books and ballads and pictures, is to 
be overcome in its campaign for our day; and 
if our Christian faith is ever to prevail among 
men, then many, many of us there must be who 
must make it our accepted prime duty to arise 
from our lounges of refined, self-satisfied, and 
fashionable religion, and gird ourselves care¬ 
fully for some very hard and painstaking work. 
The means are at hand. The existing mechan¬ 
ism of our organization now ready, can carry a 
true religious influence throughout every exist¬ 
ent branch of life. What we now await is a con¬ 
certed, consecrated, zealous application of the 
strength now latent in our laity to set the current 
in motion. The effectual religious education 
of childhood is the open door to a regenerated 


196 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


society. All the strenuous endeavors we make 
on adult conditions are handicapped. It is like 
writing on granite or twining the gnarled stiff 
boughs of an old tree. We are battling with 
the handicap of a self-satisfied age to-day. 
Our great wealth has engendered a taste for 
luxury that soothes us to slumber in the midst of 
danger. This tends ever to weaken the princi¬ 
ples of holiness, and our children have grown up 
in conformity to the world, and the problem 
with all its heartaches bursts upon us. Cities, 
towns, and frontier all present their own dis¬ 
tinctive evils; and the total impress of Christian 
doctrine, we are told, is only slight. This would 
be a national fact, and carry the hope of such a 
limitation, if our country to-day were comprised 
only of the children of the more choice original 
stock. But to all that must now be added a 
new ingredient caused by the accession of many 
millions of men and women and children who 
have come from various and vastly different 
nations. Often they are not only unchristian, 
but infidels, whose unbelief has been generated 
under false church domination. Often they are 
popish in their origin, and in many cases much 
less inclined to pure Christianity than the whole 
body of the citizenship to which they come. We 
are not, therefore, surprised to hear often a note 
of pessimism for the future, and a contention 
that the moral tone of society as a whole is suf- 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 197 


fering a severe depression. Such testimony is 
listed from our police courts and our prison 
rolls, our journals and our immoral amusements, 
our popular violence and our bold intemperance 
in life. It is indeed a most serious question for 
the Christian patriot, and one that he dares not 
be careless of, the solution of which he must 
most truly throw himself zealously into when¬ 
ever the proper course of combat is made clear. 
The fact is a great challenge to every man and 
woman who believes in God and professes his 
name, to bring every influence they can com¬ 
mand and invest it for this work. We need you 
in the Sunday school. Every church should be 
equipped with the impressive presence of large 
numbers of men and women in classes of interest, 
if for no other reason, for the one great fact that 
their presence is impressive of the genuine worth 
of the work upon children. Give us a great com¬ 
pany of interested men in every school, and we 
will have a firm grip on the boy problem of that 
community. The glaring absence of manhood 
has long been a handicap some communities 
have had to struggle against in their religious 
endeavor for boys. Mark you well that, after 
all is said and done for the finest system of edu¬ 
cational methods and organization in our Sun¬ 
day schools, the one chief virtue of the school 
is not in the information imparted to the scholar 
but in the religious and moral deposit made in 


198 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


the child life. Men and women who are per¬ 
sistently careless of the great endeavors of 
religious training must take the blame that 
accrues. 

There used to be about a little story that made 
impression of interest on me as a boy. A preacher 
was visiting a little school in a wretched part of 
a great city one day, and being requested to say 
a word to the children, he began by asking a 
question, “How many bad boys does it take to 
make one good one?” A bright little fellow from 
the streets, who had been reared—what little 
rearing he had received—entirely on kicks and 
cuffs and curses of the street, answered with 
quick confidence, “One, sir, if you treat him 
right.” That same lad at a later day became one 
of the most efficient teachers in that school. 
Would God the fine Christian philosophy of that 
simple little story would seize all our lives, and 
become the basis of faithful passionate service 
by our obligated men and women of talent and 
ability. What you do for a child may move the 
whole world, for, like old John Trebonious, you 
may be doing it for another Luther. It seems to 
me that church history is about ripe for another 
giant. Conditions call for one. You might be 
the discoverer. 

Recently from an unoccupied field in India 
there came to one of our missionaries an appeal, 
requesting that he come to the village and conse- 


THE CHURCH AND CHILDHOOD 199 


crate in baptism and take into church fellowship 
a class of seventy men and women. When the 
services began the missionary noticed a young 
lad, not yet fifteen years of age, sitting in a back 
corner of the room looking anxiously and listen¬ 
ing intently to the service. After due examina¬ 
tion, the class proving to be unusually well pre¬ 
pared for the sacrament, were baptized and 
received into the fellowship of the church. Then 
the watchful lad approached timidly, and re¬ 
quested like treatment. “Do you too desire to 
come into the Christian Church?” asked the in¬ 
terested missionary. 

“Yes sir,” was the plain answer. 

“But you are quite young, my boy, for a con¬ 
vert to come from the field of heathenism,” an¬ 
swered the missionary. “If I were to receive you 
at once into the fellowship of the church, and 
then you were to fall away, it would bring dis¬ 
credit upon the church, and do a great injury to 
the cause of Christ. I will be coming this way 
again in about six months, and if you will begin 
to-day and be very loyal to Jesus Christ during 
that time, when I come then I will gladly baptize 
you, and receive you into the church.” 

No sooner were these words uttered than the 
people arose to their feet in protest. Some speak¬ 
ing for all the others said: “Why, sir, it is he who 
has taught us everything we know about Jesus. 
We are the harvest of this lad’s life and teaching.” 


200 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


So it proved to be. That boy was the minister 
of that spontaneous church, the honored instru¬ 
ment of God for saving all that company to 
Christianity, and for planting firmly the gospel 
of the blessed God in that village. 

“A little child walked by my side. 

I had lost faith in God and man. 

He prattled of his joys and hopes. 

As only little children can. 

I did not try to blast his hopes, 

I did not tell him of my pain, 

But somehow when our walk was done. 

My shattered faith was whole again.” 


XII 


CAN THE CHURCH SAVE THE WORLD? 

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things, 
whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with 
you alway, even unto the end of the world.”—Matthew 
28 . 19 , 20 . 

The actual task to which Christianity has 
been set will, when honestly faced, either drive 
discouragement into the heart, or compel a pro¬ 
found faith in God. This fact accounts for the 
extremes of religious manifestations attendant 
upon periods of great difficulty in the world’s 
life. Folks are either driven to God for help in 
a condition they are not willing to surrender, 
but know is far beyond their own strength, or 
they abandon it in hopeless discouragement. 
The question I choose now to discuss has been 
on the lips of many these late days, as they 
have endeavored to make hard way through 
experiences no one can tolerate, and yet no one 
seems able to deliver from. Individuals have 
asked it, nations are asking it, society is asking 
it—Can the church with the old faith save the 
world? Steadfast gazing at such a world as we 
201 


202 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


find ourselves in now is quite enough to drive 
weak hearts to despair, and just what we mean 
by “weak” may need some careful measurements. 
War, desolation, sorrow, madness, suffering, 
poverty, starvation, pestilence, anarchy—all 
these many things, familiar on our news col¬ 
umns, are not the types of destroyers we expect 
to prey upon what we call weak hearts. These 
things bring heavy feet to trample strong hearts 
with. We need not wonder if the call for help 
has come from places where men have thought 
heretofore great confidence dwelt. Can there 
be any deliverance? Men’s ears are keen to¬ 
day for every actual offer. “Who can deliver 
us from the body of this death?” Can the church 
save the world? Are these forces of religion 
rugged enough and powerful enough to lift an¬ 
cient empires out of their desolation, and carve 
out effectual routes for reformation? We have 
grown used to the great smashing might of TNT. 
Can we safely place our hope in a gentle gospel? 
Have we any right to solicit men and women to 
make sacrifice to help us build churches in which 
to stand and preach the gospel, when there is 
great, gaunt hunger in the world, when desola¬ 
tion is spread over a continent, when unemploy¬ 
ment is forcing its hardship upon millions, when 
many mills are idle, and when accumulated debts 
are crushing the hearts of people and nations? 
If we are to retrench in our financial situation, 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 203 


and reduce our expenses to the last dollar of 
economical wisdom, why not begin with the 
church and let it languish until we have the 
prosperous times we all hope for some day? Is 
Christianity a luxury or a fundamental neces¬ 
sity? 

Dean Inge, of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in 
London, has been called the “gloomy Dean.” tie 
preaches much in dark terms. He faces the 
difficult with full sense of its difficulty rather 
than with the compulsory optimism of a faith in 
omnipotence. He is a keen thinker, and in 
every way an outstanding character in the 
strength of the English church. In one of his 
recent addresses he contends that we have been 
in these late years passing through a degenera¬ 
tion which has come from the fact that the twen¬ 
tieth century has come, as an heir, into a great 
fortune which the nineteenth century laid up by 
hard work. It is difficult to merely inherit a 
fortune safe]y. Those who do not pay the price 
of value in possessing it, have no sense of value 
in administering it. This great, rich century of 
ours found itself rich w T hen it came, and in¬ 
herited with its riches all the dangers of the 
easy abuse of them. Now, after a deluge of deso¬ 
lation and expenditure, this so-called New Cen¬ 
tury, which has just turned its maturity and 
stands of age, having in its childhood and adoles¬ 
cence swept the full gamut of experience already, 


204 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


finds itself in debt and in difficulty, the like of 
which no other age has ever known. The great 
nations that only yesterday held almost all the 
riches of the world are now crushed under an 
indebtedness no financier can fathom. Of this 
much I am sure, we are now as a world where we 
can grasp, and we are beginning to grasp, some¬ 
what of the meaning of the great task which has 
been laid on the shoulders of the institution that 
dares set itself to the ideal of making out of this 
world a place where men and women, such as 
we are, can actually live in a manner that be- 
cometh our claim of brotherhood under our com¬ 
mon fatherhood. The saying of this world from 
sin is no mere recreation; no task to be assumed 
on spare-time impulse. It is no work that can be 
done by legislation, no matter how well that 
legislation be drawn. 

I was engaged once in delivering a series of 
religious addresses in a public hall. One even¬ 
ing I was waited upon by a committee that had 
been sent from some socialist society in the city 
asking me to bring my congregation and abandon 
my meeting, and let the people hear a real mes¬ 
sage, and, to quote their closing words, “We will 
show you how to do at once what Christianity 
has been unable to do in two thousand years.” 
I did not adjourn my meeting, and it has been 
several years since the challenge, and I have 
seen but little change. The man who sets him- 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 205 


self to cure the ills of this sin-struck world with 
a scheme which depends on the laws and insti¬ 
tutions of men, has missed his way. Laws and 
institutions take their tone and temper from 
the men who make them. He who would right 
this world must first be equipped to right the 
sinful lives of men. You can conceive ideal 
institutions and laws, and construct complete 
new conditions of living, but when you put into 
those ideal conditions unideal men, the institu¬ 
tions will be shattered. Some one has said, “If 
you put a pig in a parlor, I know which will 
change first,” It is little trouble if you are 
possessed of a fertile brain, to shut yourself in 
your study and dream out a complete new world. 
Some Bellamy or Plato, or any other Utopian 
dreamer, can, with an ideal humanity as his 
basis, construct a new world that will dazzle 
every eye. But when he opens his door and 
walks out upon the actual pavements of the 
world where men are just as they are, rather 
than as he drew them to be, his plan fails be¬ 
cause it was conceived on a basis which does not 
exist. We are not seeking to conceive an ideal 
set of institutions. We are set at the practical 
task of constructing a godly humanity. Men 
make institutions. Institutions do not make 
men. 

When as a Christian man, with the sense of 
my task upon me, I look about to see what yet 



206 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


remains to be done, I am ashamed of our record. 
But when I compare the record of Christianity 
with what any other religion or philosophy has 
done, I confess to a comparative satisfaction at 
least. The nearer you think you have come to 
the horizon of our aims, the wider you will dis¬ 
cover our prospects to be. The footprints of 
God are evident all along our ideals anyhow, 
even if in our own actions we may have badly 
marred their evidence. Old Bishop Colenso drew 
down the world’s window blinds and bade men 
solemnly make ready the obsequies of Christian¬ 
ity. He had the burial service ready. But what 
he conceived to be the setting sun was not so at 
all, it was, rather, the dawn. The good Bishop 
seems to have been reversed in his observation. 
Some one said of Gilbert Chesterton, who always 
argues on the reverse side of every question, that 
if he was asked to describe a sunrise he would 
stand on his head and describe a sunset. I in¬ 
cline to believe Bishop Colenso mistook all the 
universe and its signs because he himself needed 
readjustment. His wail of the sunset of Chris¬ 
tianity has died away in the constant increase 
of Christian institutions about the earth. Chris¬ 
tianity has come on down the oft-menacing ages, 
and found everywhere and always the manifes¬ 
tation of her divine commission, until, as some 
one has said, “the little parochial millennium 
of the Jews has now become the universal ex- 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 207 


pectation of the race, and the limited personal 
salvation of the individual has been enlarged 
into a vast design extending its dominion to 
every faculty and interest and prospect of our 
many-sided nature.” There does not seem to be 
about us here now the atmosphere of a finished 
career. There is nothing about the world which 
seems to point to the fact that it is breaking 
down with age, nor that it has accomplished its 
purpose. I have not seen posted the notice for 
the meeting of the creditors of a bankrupt uni¬ 
verse. Everything points the other way. We are 
swept with a perfect marvel of new ambitions. 
We are finding every day the evidences of new 
possibilities. Our brains reel at the mounting 
figures of the riches we are finding. New store¬ 
houses of power are being put within our reach. 
Never was mankind so very outstanding in 
vision and dream and passion as now. And 
amid this great awakening comes the apprecia¬ 
tion of the new expectation of the world in the 
church. Once, and that not long gone either, 
the attitude of Christianity seemed to be that 
of endurance. The world grew used to the atti¬ 
tude of a religious interpretation which had its 
hope fixed only upon ultimate escape. Wrongs 
and oppressions and every evil thing, were met 
with that quenchless hope that one great, glad 
day we would make good an eternal deliverance. 
The new attitude of Christianity is that these 


208 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


things were not meant to be endured. They have 
no rights on this earth. They are here only be¬ 
cause of presumption. They must be resisted 
and overcome and driven out. Our deliverance 
needs not await an escape from an evil world. 
This world can be made a good world. The evil 
that is here needs not be, must not be, shall not 
be. At whatever cost it must be changed. What 
care we for cost, when we remember that the 
first chapter of our story is written in the blood 
of the Son of God? We have as a church only 
written our real history as we have gone forth 
regardless of all cost, and proceeded to make 
right the things that are evil. Our real churchlv 
program has not been one of endurance but one 
of aggressive opposition and conquest. The 
blood of our Lord Jesus Christ was not poured 
out upon this world merely to make here and 
there the possibility of the escape of some few 
souls to righteousness. This is a redeemed world, 
and those who believe that are challenged to 
make it as speedily as possible a saved world. 
This is the fact compulsory that should make 
enthusiasts out of Christians everywhere. It 
should consume our lives with passionate devo¬ 
tion. I am sure it will do so whenever the actual 
truth of it bursts in full meaning upon the soul. 
Its objective is large enough to command. 

A few years ago I lived in the northwest part 
of our country and so near the wilderness of the 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 209 


big wood that the news of a lost man was not 
rare, though it never lost its power to command 
enthusiastic response. Men were ready to take 
great risk in search of a lost man. But the idea 
of a lost child in the woods almost overwhelms 
one who realizes how dark and dense and dan¬ 
gerous is the night in the actual wilds. Little 
Beulah Gonthorn, only two and one half years 
of age, wandered away from the door of her 
cabin home, and was swallowed up in the quiet 
of the forest. The stricken mother, after hunt¬ 
ing with care all about the house, and in the 
near-by clearing, became frantic with fear and 
went calling down the trails into the woods, 
with no results. Calling loudly for help, her 
voice was heard, and ere evening fell with early 
darkness over the forest, several men and boys 
had been enlisted in the search. They eagerly 
searched the woods all night long. Every ear 
was set to hear the pitiful cries of a frightened 
baby in the darkness, but no one heard. That 
was Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday 
and Saturday, the news having traveled rapidly, 
every man and boy throughout the section had 
tramped and listened and looked, day and night, 
but no word came of any sign of the lost babe. 
All the stores of near villages were closed, and 
the people set themselves to find that little child. 
Sunday afternoon they brought some blood¬ 
hounds. Twice they followed a trail to an old 


210 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


haystack in a little marsh ravine, but both times 
they lost the scent there. The searchers concen¬ 
trated in that vicinity, and literally crawled 
over every foot of the ground about. The in¬ 
terest was intense. Wednesday and Wednesday 
night; Thursday and Thursday night; Friday 
and Friday night; Saturday and Saturday 
night; Sunday! and in the late afternoon in 
amazement a keen eye saw under a pile of under¬ 
brush that little baby girl, who had at last be¬ 
come too weak to attract attention. For over 
four days and nights, exposed to the wilds that 
would scare most any adult to sit alone through, 
that babe had kept alive by eating grass and the 
leaf-loam of the forest floor. She was one mass 
of scratches and bruises. Those eager, glad 
hunters now lifted the little weak body in their 
strong, triumphant arms and carried her home 
to her mother. I read the news of the recovery 
while on a flying train. It was wired to the 
world from Erskine, Minnesota. My soul was 
glad to read it, and tears of thankfulness were 
on the faces of all the people as we heard it. 
Thank God! Thank God! Thank God! I have 
said all that just to say more effectually that the 
passion of abandoned endeavor is the only logi¬ 
cal conduct for Christianity. 

I saw a tiny boy lost in a big crowd on the 
streets of Chicago one day. He was crying 
vigorously. Men were shouting at each other 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 211 


and at the crowd. Suddenly a man came plung¬ 
ing through the crowd and grabbing that crying 
boy to his breast held him tight while he re¬ 
covered his composure a bit. I was so glad I was 
standing near enough to hear the first word the 
little fellow said. Just as soon as he could choke 
down his fear, he jerked out in an effort at 
triumph, “I knew all the time you would find 
me.” Thank God for the passion of men when 
once fired. What I long to see is the issue of 
Christianity made so convincing to men that 
they will catch the call of passionate devotion. 
We must confess to all too little of it now. So 
few of those who have named the Name seem to 
really catch the gleam of the great task. To 
cleanse this world from sin! What audacity for 
folks such as are we to attempt it! 

I am an optimist with Jesus Christ. I am not 
afraid. Defeat is not a haunt to me. Jesus 
Christ is bound for the citadel of humanity. 
The task of our Lord is the world. You and I 
are vindicated in our profession of him only as 
we make evident a positive part in the perform¬ 
ance of that task. Critics who are so eloquent 
in explanation of the failure of the church find 
all the significance of their criticism in the fact 
that the Christian program is so big the casual 
observer fails utterly to see what we have been 
able thus far to do, because of the vast work 
remaining to be done. We have actually come 


212 


THE EXPECTED CHUKCH 


far, let us not lose heart that we have yet far to 
go. I remember the first time I crossed the 
ocean. Every time I allowed my mind to think 
of the vast waste of the waters about and before 
me, all the progress of the little toiling ship 
seemed lost. The horizon forever seemed the 
same. The ocean was ahead. The world had 
been left behind. All standards of measurement 
I had come to reckon distance by were gone from 
my view. I could not feel sure we were making 
progress. I bent over the side of the ship to 
watch the flying spray, but when I looked out 
everything was the same. I was not sure whether 
the ship or the ocean moved. The captain posted 
every morning the tiny mark of the log and indi¬ 
cated on the chart where we were, but it seemed 
a huge guess. Every night the sun went down 
in the same place, and the same stars came out 
to twinkle through the rigging just where I had 
seen them before. I could hear the engines. I 
could feel the throb of the great grinding pro¬ 
pellers. But somehow the ocean just seemed to 
swallow all sense of progress. It seemed supreme 
audacity when the captain told us we would see 
land at such an hour. I had had to change my 
watch so much I had lost confidence in it too. 

That is exactly the situation before the man 
who measures the work of the Church of God 
on earth to-day. The vast sweep of our task 
reaches so far beyond what we have done as to 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 213 


crush into insignificance the tiny reports we 
bring when we make bold enough to arrange our 
statistics. We read the log of our progress, and 
then turn our faces out toward the way yet to 
go, and almost lose courage. But I believe in 
God, and he posts the log of his kingdom. He 
has given us definite promises which bear upon 
the establishment of his kingdom on this earth. 
He has told us of the flowing of the nations to 
the mountain of the Lord’s house; of the day 
w hen they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s 
holy mountain; of the time when the earth shall 
be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters 
cover the sea. 

One day a critical and doubting man asked a 
missionary who had been telling of some of the 
great difficulties of the field in which he had 
been at work just what kind of prospects he 
really felt were before us for the salvation of 
the world. “As bright as the promises of God,” 
was the fine instant reply of the worker. That is 
where I take my stand. Christianity is in the 
struggle. Her banner is unfurled. The sound 
of the bugle is in her ears. The tramp of the 
march is in her feet. She has laid conquest to 
the world. I believe profoundly the world will 
be saved. Not only do I believe that Christianity 
can save the world, but I believe that that very 
ability in such high importance, carries also 
compulsion that runs into the unavoidable con- 


214 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


elusion that the world must therefore be saved. 
There is no alternative. If I did not believe 
that, my enthusiasm would die from my en¬ 
deavor. I could not urge folks to join themselves 
to an institution that was on this earth over¬ 
come with too big a task. In a day such as this, 
when enthusiasm is everywhere stirred by great 
results, I could not call for interest in an insti¬ 
tution that was merely “hanging on for dear 
life.” I appreciate the fact that the church to¬ 
day, measured against the billion-faceted world, 
is a small handful. I know we need genuine 
heroism in the task. Would God that the 
preacher would arise who could strike the note 
that would thrill the ranks to-day with the full 
sense of our espousal—the note that would 
capture the latent heroism of our youth: young 
men and young women of ambition and capacity, 
those in whose hearts and minds already are 
forming the great dreams and the big thoughts 
of a greater to-morrow. There is nothing that 
will stir real blood, and fire genuine zeal, and 
call out all the superb activity of the very best 
you possibly can be like this tremendous conflict 
of Christianity in its siege of this world. 

Allow me to close this meditation with a frank 
statement of my personal confidence in the 
triumph of our cause. The cross of Jesus Christ 
never has turned back, never will turn back. It 
is to-day increasingly the mightiest force on this 


CAN CHURCH SAVE WORLD? 215 


earth. Our Lord is still in militant conquest 
here. Not yet are all things under his feet, but 
we see evidences of his constant progress all 
about us. Sometimes the tramp of his march 
has been confused with tumbling walls and 
clashing armies and toppling thrones. Some¬ 
times the dust of the conflict has obscured our 
vision. But through it all, and always out of it 
all, has emerged our great Master ever nearer 
victory. This world can be saved. It would be 
an immeasurable pity, therefore, if for any lack 
on our part it should not be saved. There may 
repose the key of a crisis in even the least of our 
lives. We dare not risk the liability of our own 
lack of interest now. 

There was a note in the newspapers the finish¬ 
ing day of the great Panama Canal that I have 
been grateful for many times. It may have been 
missed by the multitude, but I hope it has been 
preserved in the records of our government. The 
day they prepared the final blast on the Pacific 
end of the great canal there was prepared a 
mighty group blast, whereby twenty tons of 
dynamite were to be exploded. The great charge 
was planted in five hundred and forty-one holes, 
thirty feet deep. When the electric spark was 
touched, literally hundreds of tons of mud and 
rock were hurled high in the air. The great 
gap, however, was not quite deep enough to open 
a sea level channel to low tide. An ordinary 


216 


THE EXPECTED CHURCH 


workman with a shovel opened a small trench. 
I wish I knew his name. I don’t know that it 
was even recorded. That little hand-dug trench 
of an unknown workman soon became a fast 
running stream, and then a raging torrent four 
hundred feet wide, and the waters of the great 
eager ocean ran in and filled the excavation. 
The waters of the Pacific washed up against the 
solid masonry of the Miraflores Locks, and by 
evening the steam dredges were passing through 
the channel for the first time. If these words of 
mine reach any soul that has been disheartened 
at the great task before the church, I hope they 
may plant new confidence there. The church 
stands firm to-day. The glory of God is upon it. 
The nations of the world are gravitating cer¬ 
tainly about the standard of the cross. It is 
established on the tops of the mountains and all 
the world is turning thither— 

“Let every kindred, every tribe. 

On this terrestrial ball, 

To him all majesty ascribe. 

And crown him Lord of all.” 


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